Archive: Sep 2009

The Sightline Institute has reports and maps on sustainable regional development.  They have a Cascadia Scorecard that tracks cities along seven key dimensions:: health, economy, population, energy, sprawl, wildlife, and pollution.

“The Scorecard’s target measurement for sprawl is 64 percent of a metropolitan area’s urban and suburban residents living in transit-friendly, walkable neighborhoods. That was the average for Vancouver, BC, Canada as of 2001 — the most recent data that was available when the Cascadia Scorecard was launched in 2004.   Vancouver has the best smart-growth record among Cascadian cities. In fact, it has the most compact urban structure of any of the 19 cities Sightline has analyzed to date.”

Here is a summary of research on British Columbia.  I was in Vancouver, BC this past May and I can attest to the fact that it is a very walkable city.  One of the things I look at in cities is how geography shapes growth, such as mountains and bodies of water.  Steep mountains, Burrard Inlet, and the Fraser River have all played a role in resisting the pressure for widespread sprawl.  In the lower mainland area of British Columbia, where Vancouver is, policies are in place to protect farmland and to channel development.

Twitterversion:: @Sightline Institute has great resources for understanding sustainable develment w/studies of #Cascadia. http://url.ie/2jde  #ThickCulture @Prof_K

Song:: Atmosphere – Pink Mountaintops {Vancouver, BC, CA}

See update below on LA District Attorney, Steve Cooley-30 September 2009 11:25 PDT.

First off, my opinion is that director Roman Polanski is guilty of rape, a rape that took place in 1977.  A few days ago, he was arrested in Switzerland, after police there were tipped off by US authorities.  Here’s an overview::

Over on the Salon.com broadsheet, Kate Harding wants us all to remember that Roman Polanski raped a child.  I often take issue with Salon, as several times in the past they have used gender as a wedge issue, intentionally framing things so as to stir controversy.  In this case, Harding wants the Polanski case reduced to one note:: child rapist.  While this may strengthen the emotional impact of her argument, it negates and dilutes the complexity of the situation and how others involved need to be held accountable for their actions that have led us to this point.

Those wanting the lurid details can easily find them online thanks to the prosecution, so I won’t go over those here.  I will state what Polanski was initially charged with back in 1977::

“rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance (methaqualone) to a minor.”

The prosecution, stating they wanted to spare the the girl the trauma of having to go through a trial, offered a plea bargain, where Polanski copped to the charge of ::

“engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.”

So, why did he flee the country and avoid extradition back to the US for over 30 years?

Allegedly, word got out that the media hungry judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, the “judge to the stars,” was getting a sense that the public would be outraged by this plea deal and was set to throw the book at Polanski.  Polanski fled.  This judge later went on record stating that he would stay on the bench until Polanski was returned.  That didn’t happen.  He retired from the bench in 1989 and died of cancer in 1993.  When he retired, he quoted Gilbert and Sullivan stating, “I got him [Polanski] on my list.”  {Don’t get me started on crank judges quoting showtunes and Shakespeare.}  Now, echoing those statements, Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley wants justice to be done::

“He received a very, very, very lenient sentence back then, which would never be achievable under today’s laws, and we’ll see what the court wants to do in terms of the sentence and the parameters within the case settlement they had back then.”

First off, one has to be suspect of the political motives for a DA to go after such a high-profile figure, which is reminiscent of the book/film, Bonfire of the Vanities. It seems odd to suddenly be going after a 75 year old fugitive from justice.

Update:: I have found out that Steve Cooley is on his third term as District Attorney.  He will likely be seeking another term in 2012, after successfully blocking a referendum instituting term limits for the office. – more background

I think there are more dangerous criminals who, I’m just throwing this out there, are in the LA area that pose a greater threat.  So, I find this to be a curious “triaging” of pressing cases by Cooley.  Moreover, Cooley has allowed lurid details to get out and the victim herself just wants the matter dropped ::

“[The District Attorney] has, yet one more time, given great publicity to the lurid details of those events for all to read again…True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children and my mother…I have become a victim of the actions of the district attorney.”

She received a civil settlement from him and just wants to go on with her life.

Harding in Salon will have none of that::

“Shouldn’t we be honoring her wishes above all else?

In a word, no. At least, not entirely. I happen to believe we should honor her desire not to be the subject of a media circus, which is why I haven’t named her here, even though she chose to make her identity public long ago. But as for dropping the charges, Fecke [a blogger] said it quite well: ‘I understand the victim’s feelings on this. And I sympathize, I do. But for good or ill, the justice system doesn’t work on behalf of victims; it works on behalf of justice.'”

Really.  In the same article she reminds us::

“Regardless of whatever legal misconduct might have gone on during his trial, the man admitted to unlawful sex with a minor.”

So, legal misconduct doesn’t factor into justice.  This isn’t a cafeteria where one can choose aspects of the case to embrace or ignore and legal misconduct sure factors into the appeal process.  So, those hoping for a Polanski extradition should be cautious of what they wish for.  It begs the question, is this really about justice or is it about vengeance and retribution?  What precisely is the difference in a sociocultural sense of US values?  How does this relate to the feminism{s} of today?

I’m far from a Polanski apologist, but I do care about how the system of jurisprudence operates.  I dislike the reduction of complexity to catchy and emotion-stirring soundbites and I think its irresponsible and short-sighted.  I’m not for glossing over his crimes, but how about holding the judge and prosecution responsible for letting things get to this point and treading cautiously given the implications of stirring up a flawed case, despite slam-dunk evidence.  Let’s think about what was proper and improper outside of the bedroom, but in the courtroom.

Twitterversion:: #RomanPolanski faces extradition to US for sentencing of 1977 rape, but what are the stakes for due process? @Prof_K

Song:: Desperate Danger – Pray For Polanski

An 11-year-old English schoolboy recently returned to school after summer holiday as a 12-year-old schoolgirl.  Unable to undergo surgery or horomone therapy until age 18, his parents instead changed his name and dressed him in a dress and pigtails.  The child’s classmates were reportedly “confused and tearful,” and the teachers held an emergency assembly in which they told the entire school to henceforth treat the child as a girl.  Parents were most upset (at least, publicly) at the fact that this gender bomb was dropped on them without warning and some lead-in time  to discuss the issue with their own children. 

I had just started thinking over the implications of that incident when it apparently happened again – this time, with a 9-year-old child (some parents just won’t be outdone).  This is one of those rare cases (ha!) where I don’t know exactly where my opinion lies before I begin writing.  On the one hand, I am of the belief that gender identity is not a choice, and would support my son or daughter if they came to realize they identified with the dystonic gender.  On the other hand, this is a pretty adult decision for a child to be making, and without knowing the family personally, I begin to wonder how much of this is a hurting and adamant child and how much is the parent (speaking of hurting children, both gender-switched youths are now apparently now suffering from – prepare to be unsurprised – being horrendously bullied and jeered at).

While overeducated louts such as myself wander around ruminating ponderously over the issue as though it were complex or something, less tentative folks have already started chiming in on the message boards:

“Our society is sick to allow this to happen. I suppose we can’t say anything for fear of not being ‘politically correct’. ”

“There are proably very few experts in this field when it comes to children i just hope the very best were available not some local pc correct psuedo experts.”

Nitpicky English language-related errors aside, I note the citation of political correctness as the reason why no one is apparently in an uproar over the actual gender-changing portion of our story (remember, parents were ostensibly upset because they weren’t given sufficient time to discuss it with their kids)… what do you think?

Is twelve old enough to know that you would rather be a woman for the rest of your life than a man? (my personal answer, is yeah, probably.  But this might be the least controversial part of this).

Is nine old enough?

What would you do if it were YOUR child?

In what way do you think the second incident might be related to the first?  (it might be similar to the way rape victims sometimes come forward in pairs – the first paves the way for the second, comfort-wise.  My colleague sees it more like a spreading virus).

Did these parents handle the situation poorly by not giving the rest of the school enough time to work out the complexities of the issue with their children?

As a psychologist, I realize I’m supposed to have some deep insights into this topic rather than more questions.  But firstly, I’m not that kind of psychologist.  And anyway, I’m not always (or ever, for that matter) particularly insightful.  With issues like this, I’m almost mistrustful of anyone who shows up with all the right answers immediately.  But don’t let me deter you if you’ve got ’em!

Check out this effort called Parking day NYC by artists and activists to create bite-sized, modular patches of public space. I wonder how these types of efforts might work in suburban communities?

New Yorkers to Create PreFab Parks for Park(ing) Day. via WorldChanging.com

Here are some startling figures on the world’s water supply:

When it comes to global water issues, the numbers are not pretty: 2.5 billion people (that’s nearly half the world’s population) live without safe sanitation. About 1 billion still defecate in the open, and that same number do not have access to safe drinking water.

Don’t Love That Dirty Water.via Good Magazine.

Notes from north of 49ºN

In the Twittersphere, this Ottawa Citizen article on green stimulus has been going around, based on a forthcoming UN report.  While 15% of the $3.1T in global stimulus investments are green, Canada, under the leadership of Prime Minister Stephen Harper is lagging behind {See data below the jump}, barely in the top 10 in amount spent and percentage of green stimulus.  South Korea is leading the way, in terms of both amount spent and percent of stimulus spending, while the US is third in total green stimulus spending.  Not surprising, given news reports up in Canada::

“A common theme, though, appears to be a series of delays in approvals and disbursements, with less than one-quarter likely to be spent in 2009.”

The UN report recommends that G20 countries increase the rates of investments in green infrastructure and stimulus.  Five key areas for focus were identified::

1. energy efficiency in old and new buildings
2. renewable energy technologies such as wind power
3. sustainable transport technologies such as hybrid vehicles or high-speed rail
4. global ecological infrastructure such as forests
5. sustainable agriculture

I haven’t crunched any numbers, but looking at the list, I think there’s an interaction effect with policy support of green initiatives and clusterings of firms with green innovation strategies.  One of the questions I had is whether, thus far, is the idea that “green” is viewed as a luxury.  While imperfect, I wanted to see the relationship between richer nations {higher GDP per capita} and investment in green stimulus {per capita}.  I crunched these numbers (below the jump, with the GDP data taken from the IMF 2008 data}.  While there are not enough data points to make strong inferences about the data relationship, the following graph tells a story.  South Korea skews the curve::

Taking the US & South Korea out, increases in green stimulus increases at a decreasing rate with respect to higher levels of GDP::

So, looking at the data, South Korea and China are investing in green technologies, despite having lower average national incomes.  It would be interesting to monitor which technologies are being invested in the various countries and track the outcomes.  Canada should heed what’s going on, as they try to shift towards innovation and away from natural resource extraction.

Twitterversion:: #PMHarper’s #Canada lagging #G20 in green stimulus innov. spendng. Richer tend2 spend+, but China& S.Korea making a play. http://url.ie/2ihx @Prof_K

Song:: Everythings Gone Green (Edit) – New Order

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On the UC Berkeley campus, the Center for Open Innovation is doing work in this interesting new area::

“Open innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. [This paradigm] assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.”

Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm

In a recent talk, part of the discussion was on innovation and how it related to higher education.  There was talk of “silos” of knowledge.  So, when students are taking courses, they specialize in tracks, in terms of a functional area like finance or a specific type of engineering.  The problem with this is that this may not be the best preparation for students to work in the area of innovation and I would extend this much more broadly.  In other words, universities should be preparing students to think and problem solve  innovatively.  My experience is that there is lip service paid to this, but what becomes the focus is instilling a corpus of knowledge.

Last spring, Mark C. Taylor created a firestorm of controversy by calling the university on the carpet as an antiquated institution…and graduate education as the “Detroit of higher learning”.  Oh, you didn’t hear about this? That’s because the controversy was mainly in the halls of acadème with the rest of the world marching on without missing a beat.  Nevertheless, Taylor brought up some excellent points, six key ones to be specific.  Two that struck me were revising the curriculum and abolishing departments.  His example on a focus on problems used “water”::

“Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.”

Many in the academy went ballistic, but often citing “pragmatics” that, to me, were often thinly veiled rationale for preserving extant institutional structures, power bases, and resource allocations.  In a Kuhnian philosophy of science sense, there was a lot of clinging to the existing paradigms and the marginalization of any “crisis.”  There is a crisis.  It is one of relevance.

Open innovation is a new paradigm that’s focused on problems.  If I looked back on labels that have been used to describe my work, it includes marketing, branding, Internet marketing, economic sociology, and social media.  A common theme is “technology & media,” which in my mind defines a particular paradigm examining the intersection of both, which encompasses the humanities, the social sciences, the professional disciplines, and the applied technological.  If I had my druthers, courses would be less about checkboxes and more about developing and synthesizing knowledge structures.  Maybe life sciences with a lab could be substituted with a rigorous survey of the issues, challenges, and opportunities of bionanomedicine.

While paradigms and departments are both social constructions, they can be forced into an artificial structure or allowed to evolve organically…or even die.  I once sat in on a session where local employers close to a university I was working at stated what they wanted in an ideal undergraduate candidate.  There was a lot of passive reaction to what often boiled down to a desire for vocational education for job candidates.  Can students use the advanced features of Outlook or do a mail merge?  Please.  Universities need to redesign what they’re offering after reconceptualizing what they really are trying to do, knowledgewise, starting with the curriculum.  Over a decade ago, I was reading about differential perspectives on knowledge.  Some organizations treat employees {as repositories of knowledge} like stones in a wall to be built.  Others treat them like uniform bricks.  Universities play a role in this shaping.  Over the years, I grew weary of the pressures to create bricks and questioned the true utility of this.

I also think it’s time for universities to move away from churning out undergraduates, graduate, and professional students and become true fixtures of communities with a mission of serving lifelong learning–in the era of the free.

Twitterversion:: Innovation & innovative thinking in higher ed. Will knowledge “silos” persist & how will ivory tower adapt? http://url.ie/2i59 #ThickCulture @Prof_K

Song:: LITTLE BOXES – The Submarines

I’ve always believed that we’re too overawed by our own technological prowess, but this poster presented last June at the Human Brain Mapping Conference should really serve as a cautionary tale for those of us who glance at fMRI research and figure that the findings are wholly trustworthy.

A graduate student at Dartmouth was busily engaged in two things that graduate students do best: research, and general goofiness.  The research, in the area of decision-making, involved scanning people’s brains while they observed photographs and attempted to guess the emotional valence of the subjects depicted.  The goofiness involved using various objects bought at the supermarket as scanning targets while they were developing their protocols.  A pumpkin went in first, and then a cornish game hen.  Finally, the researcher purchased a whole Atlantic Salmon and strapped him into the fMRI machine.  Ever the scientist, he ran the protocols properly, showing the deceased fishie the photographs and asking it to guess at the emotions being displayed.

A certain amount of false positives are expected, but it was where the false positives were that alarmed the grad student – right in the salmon’s dead little brain cavity. 

Rather than worrying, however, that deceased ectotherms have the ability to successfully read human emotions, we should take this as a warning to have a healthy skepticism regarding the interpretation of fMRI data, especially since multiple comparisons, though recommended, are hardly ever done.  I’m always hearing about how fMRI research has pinpointed the part of our brain that may be responsible for (divorce, personality traits, wristwatch preference)… brain imaging research is amazing and we’ve advanced by leaps and bounds – but in a lot of ways, we’re still swimming upstream.

This is a few months old, but interesting.  Paul Smalera at Slate asks if Obama is the Getting Things Done (GTD) president.  Anyone who works in IT or knows someone who works in IT is familiar with the cult (I mean that in a nice way) of productivity guru David Allen and his GTD system for managing work flow.

Smalera asks whether Obama is being too much of a checklist president , focused on moving legislation off his to-do list instead of focusing on fewer bills that would forward a progressive agenda.

To be fair to David Allen, he does talk about conducting a weekly review where you, in personal development speak, adopt a 50,000 foot view of your goals.

My take is that presidents need to be GTD focused in their first six months.  I envision a 2011 State of the Union address where President Obama  can spend 60 minutes ticking off accomplishments from his first term….taking a page out of Bill Clinton’s playbook.  Think about Bush 43’s legislative agenda in his first term which included the Medicare Prescription Drug legislation and No Child Left Behind.

The big question is why we prefer our presidents to be able to rattle off a laundry list of accomplishments.  I think is goes to our core American ethos.  GTD is so popular because it provides people with a manual for fitting into American norms….kind of like The Protestant Work Ethic for white collar workers.

I’m currently reading through George Packer’s wonderful two volume edited collection of George Orwell essays (“Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays” and “All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays”). With all due respect to the erudite defaming of George Orwell in the pages of NYRB, I love the guy. I love his lucid writing. I love his courage in criticizing what he sees as wrong. I love his methodology of putting himself in the middle of things. I love his sentimentality about hearths and his homeland. Earlier this week, I read his well-known, WWII-era essay, “England Your England,” and regard it as among his very best. I believe so much of it speaks to our current state of affairs that I’d like bring some of its key points up to date. Rather than writing a full essay (which would inevitably pale in comparison), I’d like to do a little series pulling out some points of interest. This will be the first.

Orwell begins with the claim that culture differences between nations are big and meaningful: “Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country … Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another. Hitler’s June purge, for instance, could not have happened in England.”

This sort of claim remains controversial today. Browning’s Ordinary Men argued that the Holocaust wasn’t based on intrinsic characteristics of the German people, while Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners countered with just the opposite claim. Today, we often hear much about the immutable cultural differences between Americans and Europeans (“Americans live to work, European work to live”). Advocates of a single payer system of health care have repeatedly been told that such a system would never be accepted in the United States. Tom Friedman wrote just this Sunday about how a $1 gas tax should be, but is not up for debate in the U.S. (despite sky-high gas taxes in European countries). The mandatory religious rhetoric in any American political speech (e.g., “God Bless America”) would be the cause of scandal in Europe.

While such limitations on political speech and manner of living are profound burdens, Orwell also claims that being a member of a national culture is, ultimately, meaningful to each of us. “And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time … Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.”

Though we might threaten to leave (if Bush is elected in 2004) and though the vile racism and hatred and ugly nationalism at town halls and “tea party” events might disgust us, America will always feel like a home to those of us who were raised here. We breathe easier in the air we’re accustomed to. Talking loudly while eating a slice of pizza and walking down a city block, the choice of sixteen varieties of mustard in the grocery store, and the simple pleasure of a gas-guzzling muscle car and an open road are, for better or for worse, things that feel like home.

“Yes,” says Orwell, “there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own.”

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the continuing legacy of the rice paddy for Asian cultures, the “culture of honor” in the American South, and the significance of hierarchy in Korean society. To be sure, our nations and our cultures constrain our behavior and even our ways of thinking. But perhaps perversely, the very culture that limits us also comforts us.