So I wrote a harsh post after reading a harsh article by Kevin Carey in The New Republic about Diane Ravitch. I still standby what I said. Namely, I’m very cautious about trusting Ravitch as a reliable narrator of history because I’m:

• unfamiliar with good historiography/methodology so it’s hard for me to judge the quality of her work simply from the product itself
• unaware of a rich discourse around education history in NYC and 20th century America in general that wrestles with, or even corroborates, Ravitch’s account
• certain that Ravitch’s more recent writings often mischaracterizes the power and meaning behind quantitative research and exhibits selection bias to fit a particular narrative
• generally distrustful of public academics, particularly when their writing is mainly outside of their primary discipline.

That being said, there have been several well-written critiques of Carey’s piece and I thought it’s only fair that I link to them to present a more complete picture of what many folks, some who agree and some who disagree with Ravitch’s current ideology, think of Ravitch’s work.

Mike Petrilli is certainly no fan of Ravitch’s rebirth as the anti-choice, anti-accountability voice du jour. But his piece in Flypaper in response to Carey is quite clear: the idea that Ravitch’s personal life  had an impact on her criticism of then NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is unfair and wrong. As someone who worked directly with Ravitch and who had, independently, overseen the awarding of a grant to Mary Butz’s leadership program, Petrilli sees a different line of thought. Ravitch, in his view, simply correctly pointed to the flaw in Klein’s “clear the field” approach that tended to cut down successful or promising programs alongside the dead weight.

Dana Goldstein’s response suggests that Kevin Carey ignored the context in which Ravitch wrote. Goldstein suggests that Ravitch had to fight against a sexist academy in a discipline that increasingly had taken on a polemicists tone, as a liberal who did not quite fit the mold of her times. These factors combined to generate the type of histories and writing that Ravitch would produce and are critical in understanding, without undermining, her work.

Finally, Diane Senechal writes in The New Republic today that Ravitch’s history is a far more balanced critique than Carey would have you believe, very well documented, and self-consistent. She does concede that Ravitch writes with a fiery, decidedly non-academic tone that’s intended as a public intellectual. But here, Senechal views this as a strength, “arous[ing] general interest in matters that might otherwise seem out of reach or obscure.” Ultimately, Senechal’s main point is that Ravitch’s work is of very high quality and thorough and that her tone should not overshadow the accomplishment of her scholarship.

I’m mostly writing this post because I had a fairly hard time finding a resolution to a real pesky error. For some reason, my iPhone 4S was recognized by Picasa but always failed to import photos. Whenever I tried, the Picasa was clearly scanning through the files and then presented this error:

An error has occurred while attempting to import. Either the source is unavailable or the destination is full or read only (1).

The resolution was found on this page posted by Tradeinstyle. A slightly more thorough explanation of the solution below.

If you are seeing this error, what appears to have happened is that several images are “corrupted” in some way on your iPhone. Unfortunately, this requires opening up iPhoto. Once in iPhoto, you should be at the import screen and see all the pictures available on your phone. Several of these pictures will have a thumbnail consisting only of a dotted-line forming a square– a blank thumbnail. You’ll want to import these photos and, after clicking import, be sure to select the option that removes them from your iPhone. Now move these imported photos from your newly create iPhoto library into your normal Pictures folder (or wherever you’re watching for pictures in Picasa). They’ll load just fine. Exit iPhoto, delete your iPhoto Library (probably located in ~/Pictures/iPhoto\ Library) to avoid duplicates and open Picasa. Because the “offending” pictures have now been removed, Picasa should be able to easily import your photos.

This problem does not appear to be specific to the iPhone 4s and is probably applicable to all iOS5 devices.

I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the failure of all the major players to get social right. I have a very simple dream for how the social web should work and its baffling to me that many obvious use-cases have not been addressed at all by Facebook, Twitter, or Google.

This is the first of two posts that will describe what I view as a viable framework for a social web experience. The whole goal of social web, in my view, is to read, share, discover, and communicate about found content. This post will focus on finding and reading content. The second will focus on sharing and discussing that content.

Properly Handle Content Sources

One of the major shortcomings of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ is source content. The backbone of the ideal social experience is not simply sharing inane details of your personal life. It’s making the entire web a community activity. It’s about making communication on the internet as rich and natural an experience as possible. The branded pages and official accounts simply do not substitute for an excellent content platform. The origin of this problem is simple– the modern social network is entirely built upon connecting people, and content generators are just considered a hacked up special class of people. Reading (and generating) content is the ground floor of the social experience.

What’s my evidence that this model is insufficient? The popularity of services like Google Reader, Flipboard, Feedly, etc. Need more? The three major social players are all introducing new ways to bring content sources into their services and keep my eyes within their system. Facebook has its Social Reader, which is just creepy to me because I can’t share outside of Facebook and I don’t want everything my eyes glaze over to be shared instantly with everyone. Twitter has its “Discover” tab that goes well beyond trending and tries to create a pre-curated reader experience. Google has Currents, a Flipboard clone that’s based upon casual magazine style reading, complete with a whole new set of subscriptions, a good mobile experience, and easy sharing into Google Plus.

But none of these solutions recognize that there are at least three major domains of access content.

Bookmarking

The first way people find content is from sources they want to read casually. These are the sites you check when you’re bored or when there’s a massive breaking story. This is your New York Times or CNN.com pushing out massive amounts of timely information that you just want to dip into time to time. This is one form of content that folks are just starting to get right. Flipboard/Google Currents successfully gives a gorgeous platform for casually reading across many sources. There’s no need to keep track of every story or go through content methodically. This reading experience is quick and casual and all about stumbling across something.

Collecting

This is the bread and butter for RSS subscribers and one of the major areas that most social players are ignoring. Collecting means you want to read everything someone or some site writes. You want to make sure to come back and glance over things you don’t get a chance to see. Read/unread counts are a critical piece of making sure you read every piece of news that comes through. This is content reading you want to tag, save, easily search through, etc. Another way to think of collecting is the set of information you trust only yourself to sort through a curate. This isn’t your list of pretty recipes that come streaming in quickly and are throw-aways. These are your trusted insider industry areas that get at the heart of your job or most important hobbies.

Streaming

This is the traditional “news feed” of social reading. It’s how you see what all your “friends” are sharing, doing, and saying. This is about finding the trends, the conversations that are blowing up, the short funny statements, etc. You almost definitely don’t care if you miss something someone posts here, but you want to be able to see the cream that rises to the top. You want a way that conveniently allows you to enter someone else’s workspace and interact with the content they’ve shared with you. This is the other area that social has some models that work well and was the basis for all other activities on the social web. It’s also one of the social webs major problems. The stream is massive and cannot be absorbed in whole. Most of the content is throwaway. But because almost all other social reading is based on the stream, all of our content, even what we collect and bookmark, becomes throwaway and short-lived, given the same priority as your long lost aunt in an old age home playing Farmville.

For me, the social web has to start with providing me with a single space that aggregates what I want to read on the web. If content is not easy for me to get access to, I’m never going to even worry about being satisfied with my options for sharing. Social fails right now because they haven’t gotten the reading paradigm right. It’s nowhere close to handling the three major domains–bookmarking, collecting, and streaming– effectively under a single attractive interface. I think Google is the closest. If you combine some of the features in Currents, their new attractive mobile reader that works great for bookmarking, with some of the critical features in Google Reader, right now the best collector, then I’m very close to an ideal reading experience. My hope is that someone will find a way to combine all three and then provide the robust sharing features I’ll write about in my next post.

I am glad that Philissa Cramer is reporting on some of the deeper details of the Special Education Student Information System ¹ implementation at the New York City Department of Education here. Many people don’t really understand the ins and outs of government contracting. Folks really think NASA designs and builds the lunar module, for example, instead of realizing that they issued an RFP and contracting with Northrop Grumman to do that work for them. Similarly, in education, especially around complex technology projects, most districts and states purchase products or services through a bid product rather than develop solutions in house.

However, I am a bit disappointed in the angle that City Limits, (Ms. Cramer’s source) took in their reporting. There are real problems with government contracting, but they really mischaracterize the story around SESIS in an attempt to simplify the issue for casual readers. City Limits acts as though it is surprising, or even deplorable, that an RFP was awarded to a company with a largely existing product.

They point to the fact that Maximus, the vendor for the SESIS contract, was modifying an existing product to meet the requirements outlined in NYC DOE’s RFP as though this was clearly bad. City Limits uses words like “revealed” and “simply” to describe what Maximus was offering. This just ignores the reality of government contracting and shows disregard for risk mitigation. Almost all government agencies handsomely reward companies that can point to successes in developing and implementing solutions that can meet many of the requirements outlined in the issued RFP. The government wants to hire people it believes can do the job and do it well and often one of the best ways to make that determination is to see that someone has done it before. In almost all cases, this means selecting a vendor who has an existing product or process for meeting many of the requirements in the RFP that will be expanded upon or modified. But government purchasers don’t just want experienced partners, they also want to leverage efficiencies by not paying for duplication. One of the major reasons for purchasing an existing product or contracting with a vendor is that school systems actually aren’t that different from one another and the basic functionality and organizational structures required in an IT solution are shared across schools, districts, and states. Why pay substantially to build the same basic software infrastructure that already exists elsewhere? It’s a waste of money most of the time.

City Limits then goes on to criticize the massive increases that can occur due to change orders. This is a serious problem with government contracting, but they fail to really explore why. A change order occurs when the client wants new or additional functionality that was not included in the initial contract. Their frequency and expense are not an example of why government agencies should not contract with outside vendors, rather, they demonstrate just how poorly bureaucracies are at managing large-scale complex projects. Change orders happen due to several failures, and almost all are the government agencies’ fault. In no particular order, the government agency:

• failed to do proper discovery before issuing the RFP and, therefore, missed major functional requirements that are not identified until more intensive discovery occurs during development or initial implementation;
• agreed to a contract that was far too specific and did not allow for the reality that requirements do evolve over time (though often not in ways which substantially change the nature or quantity of work);
• agreed to a contract that was far too vague such that the vendor can claim to have delivered a product or service when they did not meet already identified functional requirements for the system;
• did not take into account the preparation and costs required to sustain the product beyond the life of the initial engagement with the vendor.

These are the main things that lead to change orders. If the government agency is doing a top-notch job, they can all be avoided and the only occasion for a change order should be large external shocks that dramatically alter the functional requirements, intentional decisions to move away from the initial functional requirements that weighed the costs of altering the vendor contract, and a desire to extend and expand a relationship because of the success of the initial implementation resulting in a substantially more advanced or mature product.

It is really hard to manage vendor contracts right. It requires actually knowing what you want to buy before an RFP is issued (or recognizing what is and is not known and correctly assessing the scope of the impact future decisions on unknowns will have on the work). It requires a really good team of lawyers to fight outside forces that literally make their profits on carefully abdicating as much responsibility as possible at the contracting phase. It requires selecting good partners that are adequately willing and prepared to evolve and work with the agency as their needs and knowledge grow and mature. It requires an honest assessment of future resources that will be available to assure sustainability of large investments. And perhaps most difficult of all, it requires strong project management infrastructure throughout the entire agency to ensure alignment and consistency across multiple products produced internally and by multiple external partners.

The benefits of outsourcing products can be huge and are worth leveraging. Vendor contracts are difficult to manage, and bureaucracies are not always well-suited to managing these projects, but all government agencies struggle with getting this right.

One last parting thought…

In my view, the most challenging aspect of getting vendor contracting right for government agencies is spending ample upfront time, even before issuing an RFP, articulating the functional needs that a solution must meet in detail. I feel that often public sector employees are so intimidated by the arduous process around issuing and awarding an RFP that they rush to get an RFP out there and worry about the details during contracting and product initiation. Whenever possible, resist this temptation at all costs. Whether custom designed internally or provided by an external vendor, satisfaction is dependent upon clarity of the desired outcomes. This is particularly true with technology projects. Vendors will always produce something, but whether the solution is any good is almost entirely up to good requirements gathering.

UPDATE: You should also read this page on jasonpbecker for some very strong and interesting rebuttals to Carey’s article that I commented on below.

Do read this article on Diane Ravitch. I personally have two major criticisms of Ravitch, both of which Carey exposes eloquently.

First, I believe that she leverages her respect and expertise as an historian and professor to present herself as an experts in areas of academic research and policy where she has little expertise. This is very common with public intellectuals, and I think it’s deceiving and deplorable.

Second, I am unsure about whether she is a reliable narrator of history because my impression is that she’s the “best in the game” at least in part because so few are playing. I don’t personally have the skill to judge her histories and given her blatant academic dishonesty in so many other areas where I have some ability to judge quality, I find it hard to view her as an honest operator.

What is somewhat new in Carey’s take on Ravitch, and what I think most here on Plus will find interesting, are two revelations. First, one I was somewhat acquainted with, it seems possible that some of Ravitch’s shift to rhetorical vitriol against someone who seemed a natural ally (Joel Klein) may be partially attributable to a personal dispute involving Ravitch’s “partner” (this and other articles seem to be intentionally ambiguous about the nature of this relationship). Second, and most interesting to me, it appears that Ravitch doesn’t have the typical academic acumen of an acclaimed scholar in her field. In fact, it appears that Ravitch has produced almost exclusively popular history throughout her career. This detail in particular plays into some of my very concerns about the reliability of her historical narratives.

On a side note, I think if I could be one person in education policy today it’d be Kevin Carey. He’s smart as hell and an excellent writer, even if I disagree with him on higher education issues.

I love that Providence is pursuing a streetcar. There are really just two things I don’t understand about the Core Connector’s proposal. I’m going to tackle one in this post.

Why is the entire streetcar route shared with general traffic with no dedicated right-of-way? Truthfully, this isn’t a massive issue except in the core part of Downcity where there is substantial traffic during rush hours along the street car route. But this makes the plan even more perplexing because it’s precisely this portion of the route where an obvious solution for dedicated light rail ROW exists- Westminster Street.

The red route above represents the proposed streetcar line. The green line represents Westminster Street, a narrow, single lane, one-way street that cuts through Downcity and in front of restaurants, boutique shopping, URI, etc. It brings the streetcar line slightly closer to Johnson and Wales and slightly further from the Dunkin Donuts Arena and Rhode Island Convention Center. While there is real automobile traffic, this is almost entirely for two reasons. First, Westminster has substantial on-street metered parking. Second, Westminster is the East->West one-way to counter Weybosset’s West-East.

Of course, the two major Downcity planning projects underway are removing the stress that leads to both of these uses. The Downtown Circulator project is nearly complete, converting Empire and Weybosset to two-way streets. Automobile traffic will almost certainly take the wider and faster Washington and Weybosset Streets, adjacent to Westminster, unless the goal is to find on the street parking. The second project is the Core Connector itself, which provides more options to get into Downcity without a car, hopefully reducing the need for parking. There are also substantial parking capacity that’s underutilized in the many surface lots and parking garages in the area.

As far as I can tell, there is really no need for Westminster to have street traffic. A dedicated ROW will increase the speed and predictability of the streetcar. Additional pedestrian space along Westminster could quickly be used by the cafes and restaurants and street vendors that already are in the area. The only reason I could come up with for not using Westminster as a dedicated right-of-way for the streetcar is the need for a turn in or around Kennedy Plaza. There are so many options for moving between Washington and Westminster that I just can’t buy this as an insurmountable challenge.

I was unable to make it to the three recent public meetings about the proposed route. If I were there, this would certainly be my first question.

There are lots of things that are misleading about this story published on GoLocalProv. It is utterly ridiculous to report numbers like how many total tax dollars are being collected by different communities for the sake of comparison. You cannot compare a total number like this which is so dependent upon things like, I don’t know, the dramatic difference in the size of these communities?

In the 2010 Census, Providence had a population of 178,042. New Shoreham had a population of 1,051. Is anyone surprised that one of these communities is on the top of the list and the other on the bottom?

There’s more than size at play, but the least GLP could have done was to correct for population and present the per capita levy. All it takes is one quick Google search and we can get the 2010 Census numbers which are probably pretty damn close to the current population so we can get a decent, somewhat level playing field to compare cities and towns on. Here’s the 2010 Census numbers from the RI Department of Labor and Training.

So with 5 minutes in Excel (thanks, GLP, for making your charts images instead of tables), here’s a much more interesting list:

</td>
<td>
  \$55,162,905
</td>
<td>

</td>
<td>

</td>
<td>
  \$21,611,447

</td>
<td>

</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td height="12">
  North Smithfield
</td>
<td>
  \$27,592,721
</td>
<td>
 11,967
</td>
<td>
  **\$2,306**
</td>

I wondered to myself If I could explain these two movements in a few sentences. Is this fair?

The Taxed Enough Already (TEA) Party movement is a response to two large government spending packages, the “bailout” and the “stimulus” package. These people felt that it was inappropriate for the government spend taxpayer money (and foreign debt) in an attempt to prevent deeper economic damage from the collapse of the real estate bubble.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is a response to the same two large government spending packages as well as the subsequently ineffectual American government during the first term of the Obama Presidency. These people are skeptical that the “bailout” and “stimulus” package addressed the challenges that the vast majority of Americans face every day in favor of addressing the needs of an elite economic and political class.

I wanted to write a lot more about this, but I just don’t have the time.

This storyis about rezoning schools in downtown Manhattan which is struggling to meet the demands of emerging residential neighborhoods. Reading this story (and struggle) just brought up something I’ve thought about for some time now.

The cost of school buildings is ridiculous. Schools are generally built for one purpose. They are generally built to last a very long time. They are generally built to a quality standard that suggests it will perennially be far too expensive to knock down and start over even if renovations are obscenely expensive and inadequate. In most areas (dense urban cities are probably the exception), we build schools on large plots of land with field/park space attached. This land is technically for public use, but in the name of safety for children, land uses are far more restrictive than most public parks.

It all just seems like an absurd setup that wastes countless public dollars. Why wouldn’t we want to have smaller schools in mixed-use spaces that represent far less capital investment and introduce substantial budget flexibility as enrollment patterns change? Why would we want to build separate libraries from existing public resources? Why would we want separate fields rather than bringing students to truly public spaces during the day?

The school house as a public space that’s isolated and locked away from the community that builds it, the school house that’s on a 100-year bond designed in such a way that any conversion to other uses is very unlikely… isn’t that school house a bit anachronistic?

As a resident of Downcity, I have been closely following the development of Providence’s Core Connector Study. The official route and payment options have now been proposed, as reported in the Projo.

Route

I’m pleased to see that they prioritized frequent service through the main ridership areas (College Hill to Jewelry District and hospital) were prioritized over service to the train station. Jef Nickerson says it best over at GCPVD– the train station is out-of-the-way and would dramatically increase rider time while having unclear implications for ridership, and the station is already very well served (and could easily be better served) by existing bus routes. The streetcar is really about moving people within Providence and providing a permanency to the connectivity between the current (Brown and hospital) and hopefully future (Jewelry District) economic engines of the city.

The proposed route uses Washington and Empire Street– both are wise choices. Washington Street adds the Biltmore, Lupos, URI, and AS220 directly to the route while keeping the Convention Center and the Dunk near by. Washington also has the advantage of a direct route over 95 for a possible South-Westward expansion in the future with limited cost and slow downs due to a lack of turns. Empire Street is also a great choice. The road is only about to undergo construction to be expanded for two-way traffic (one of the last legs of the Downtown Circulator project). The corner of Washington and Empire anchors the streetcar at the Providence Central Library, Trinity Rep, AS220, 38 Studios, and Hasbro’s new Downcity location. Regency Plaza adds more residential ridership and the massive parking lot across from the Hilton suddenly looks more attractive for infill development. It doesn’t hurt that I live at Westminster and Empire and would be excellently served by this location. Overall, I believe this path through Downcity is the easiest to manage while anchoring the streetcar near major hubs of activity. I only wish they could have found a way to bring the streetcar down Westminster and close the street to personal vehicle traffic, but that was never a likely option.

The Jewelry District part of the route never seemed as controversial to me because there were limited solutions that  were somewhat obvious. The decision to use Chestnut makes sense and solidifies the Westminster-Chestnut Street path as a strong North-South connector through the area. Not going all the way to Prairie Avenue is likely going to anger some Upper South Providence residents, but I’m not convinced this is a bad thing. At the Knowledge District Development Framework meeting it was clear that increasing paucity between the two sides of Prairie Avenue was a major goal of development in the hospital area. Forcing people to walk a bit on Dudley Street may generate the kind of foot traffic needed to make infill in that area with first floor retail a lot more attractive.

The Tax

I’m in favor of it. This one is a no-brainer in my mind. Property values will certainly increase in the areas being served by the streetcar and therefore current owners stand to have some significant gains in equity if this project moves forward. The attractiveness of living where I am has increased tremendously for Brown faculty and staff, medical students, and some of the entrepreneurs and their employees if they ever materialize in the Jewelry District. That I should have to contribute some of this gained equity back to get the project built makes sense. The question is, will the requested tax be too high to be worth it? So let’s do the math. The proposal will hit me with $0.95 on every $1,000 of property value. Let’s assume that the homestead exemption will not be applied to this tax. Let’s also assume that I’m looking at a 15 year stay Downcity. This is reasonable because most of the properties around here are condos that are one or two bedroom and are not attractive to folks with families– we’re filled with young folks and empty-nesters who aren’t likely to be looking at this like a 30 year investment. Let’s also assume that the economy will continue to stagnate over this period so we only see an inflation rate of, say, 2%. It’s likely that this is an overly pessimistic estimate that will increase the cost. What I’m interested in is the present discounted value, or the cost to me due to this tax if I were to incur it all up front. The theory goes that money today is worth more than money tomorrow because money depreciates in value due to inflation and because money today can be invested and will grow over time. We calculate PDV much like you would calculate compound interest. The final piece of data to calculate the PDV needed is my home value. Let’s assume it hasn’t moved at all since I purchased about a year ago, which would peg my condo at $168,000. Now I want to know if the PDV of the tax will exceed what I believe is a reasonable estimate for the increase in equity I will realize because of the project. And the PDV is…

$2,050.74

I think it would be hard to argue that my property value won’t increase at least 1.2% because of this project. Adding the line, “Steps to the Providence Streetcar that will take you to Brown’s Medical School, through the Knowledge District, and to the Hospitals or through Downcity to RISD and Brown,” is going to be worth more than that, period. I can’t imagine the calculus is dramatically different for other Downcity property owners which means for us, this makes “cents”.

If you’re interested in education, I highly recommend Justin Baeder’s¹ “On Performance” blog hosted over on Education Week.

Today, he ended his post with a question, “I would be very interested to learn of any other sector that has achieved substantial performance gains by reforming its evaluation processes. We’re putting a lot of eggs in the ‘improve teacher evaluation to improve student learning’ basket, but no one even seems to be asking whether this strategy has any merit.”

I think this is the write idea but the wrong question. What we should wonder is whether any other sector has achieved substantial performance gains by reforming its entire process for hiring, retaining, supporting, and terminating its employees when that sector started with an extremely rigid, non-differentiated structure. Teacher evaluation is about providing better professional growth opportunities targeted to an individual’s needs. It’s about rewarding folks who are doing a stellar job and making sure that you can reward mission-critical people who might otherwise leave for other opportunities. And, much to many union members’ chagrin, it’s also about providing substantial a substantial and trusted evidence base that principals can turn to justify termination decisions.

Ask your favorite policy professional or administrator why they are pushing for centralized, mandatory, and prescriptive forms of teacher evaluation. I can guarantee they’ll include the current lack of serious evaluation in schools. I would bet that most folks also are pushing for these policies as a proactive step to make sure they can win union-based challenges against performance-based terminations and reassignment. Because the teacher unions are so strong and are largely steadfast in their need to treat all teachers equally², policymakers feel like they have to wrap evaluations in as much novel social science and standardization as possible so that they have even the tiniest chance in hell of holding up in court. To what extent can the lack of robust evaluation be connected to school leaders’ lack of self-efficacy for action on this information?

Teachers fear that a world without these protections would produce unfair evaluations and termination procedures that are subjective. Secretly, I bet that most policymakers would be totally comfortable not pushing hard for value-added models and overly specific observation rubrics. So long as they felt confident they could take action in response to the evaluations, the current evaluation hawks would instead be willing to leave much more to individual professional judgment³. If the primary relationship in a school building was professional, and not a unionized labor-management split, a lot of the current evaluation policy might not be necessary. In the very least, the policies could be less centralized. But ultimately, professionals are held accountable for their work quality by bosses that employees respect as professionals.

I’ll end with one final thought: I wonder what the teacher evaluation narrative would be like in an alternative history where there was no split between the teacher unions and professional organizations of education administrators and professors.

Important note: while I do work at a state department of education, I am not directly involved in nor am I intimately familiar with our teacher evaluation model or policies. As an employee of the Rhode Island Department of Education, I am also a member of the American Federation of Teachers Local 2012 union. The thoughts I’ve expressed in this post are entirely my own and does not represent the AFT or RIDE’s position.

As an undergraduate I largely avoided political science because I couldn’t imagine getting interested in reading The Republic, Leviathan, or Wealth of Nations. Political philosophy, and philosophy in general, just seemed like a horrible painful exercise, so I avoided it. Of course now that I’m involved in public policy and not organic chemistry, it feels as though I’ve done a horrible disservice to myself by not going through and systematically exploring more fundamental questions about the role of the state, ethics and morality, justice, etc.

Part of my personal re-education in this area has been much easier by having access to a host of well-written blogs that host great conversations about these issues. These sources are smart, generally trustworthy, and are generally collegial. By reading actual academics apply their knowledge to current events, I am able to get access to a much more sophisticated conversation than is available in most popular media.

One of these sources is Bleeding Heart Libertarians, which seeks to explain how libertarians can have robust participation in social justice. This is a particularly interesting topic since, as I understand it, one of the major critiques of libertarianism is that it does not address social justice in a comprehensive and sufficient way.

Today, commenting on Ron Paul’s response to Wolf Blitzer’s baiting on healthcare¹, BHL contributor Professor Roderick Long brought up one of the libertarian arguments that most confounds me– charity and mutual aid. Long writes that a libertarians second response to an individual’s failure to use basic services ((Specifically, Blitzer presents the case of a healthy young man who foregoes health insurance. However, Professor Long’s suggested response is sufficiently vague that I believe it is safe to say that he would apply the same three stages to any situation where an individual’s circumstances or decisions have jeopardized their access to basic needs. This includes all social safety net programs.)) should be, “talk about how charity and mutual aid are more efficient than government welfare, and how we therefore need to shift the venue of assistance from the latter to the former.”

This argument had always felt extremely classist to me. It seems that those who are most vulnerable have never been the folks who have access to mutual aid or charity through local community organizations, family members, friends, and other contacts. General social capital aside, even people who have strong community ties who are most likely to need access to a social safety net live in communities that overwhelming don’t have the collective resources to offer sufficient aid to promote the welfare of that community. The whole concept seems steeped in a highly culturally informed sense of reality that imagines a small town church community as opposed to the generationally impoverished’s reality.

It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to the argument that it is possible that models of mutual aid and charity could ultimately private superior resource allocation, it’s just that I don’t think that aggregate efficiency is the goal here. I realize that this is a statement of prior moral conviction, but it seems to me that the ostensible purpose of safety nets is to make sure the most coverage against a failure to meet the basic needs of all people. Under this situation, efficiency is desirable but secondary, and I don’t see how mutual aid and charity will provide sufficient coverage to meet the needs of the most important beneficiaries of these policies.

For several years I considered switching to Apple. I’ve been a wannabe believer since OSX. I was using Linuxas my every day operating system. This was one part about learning, one part frustration with Windows perpetual funky instabilities, and part a growing appreciation for things like the command line interface and free and open source software. OSX offered many things I liked– a great CLI I was already getting intimately familiar with, rock hard stability, beautiful graphic effects like those I enjoyed with Compiz, etc. More importantly, OSX could do all this while providing me with a decent experience on some of the software I’d love to dump but simply could not like Microsoft Office. Additionally, I wouldn’t have all kinds of problems on the web surfing pages that were supposedly platform neutral and using browsers that were supposedly cross-platform (Flash on Linux was a joke as recently as two years ago when I abandoned Linux as my every day operating system). Of course, perhaps first and foremost, I would never have to worry about whether an update will cause a conflict because I was forced to use a deprecated driver to get my hardware to work or that some of my hardware would be limited because there wasn’t a fully functional driver available. But every time it came to a decision on purchasing a new machine, I could not bring myself to pay the “Apple tax”. I was a student, and while I’ve generally felt that the Macbook Pro/Powerbook have had reasonable economics and a physical design well beyond their competitors, I just couldn’t justify the price to power ratio. So I continued to build my own desktops and work on an IBM Thinkpad I would buy after finding a good deal.

A year ago that changed when I purchased a 13" Macbook Pro. My laptop had totally crapped out on me and I needed a replacement fast. Combining the education discount (which I used a recently expired student ID for), a free printer and iPod, and tax-free weekend in Massachusetts meant I could buy a brand new MBP for around $900. Nothing really could compete with this– the price was right, the battery life, weight, size, and power were all right and I couldn’t even reach parody with another PC. So I purchased my Macbook Pro.

I was very happy with that laptop. A great keyboard is a must, and the Macbook Pro was the best I used other than my old Thinkpad T43. In addition to the keyboard, I also got a trackpad that was far superior to any I had used before that actually allowed me to ditch the mouse I normally carried with me everywhere I went. The battery life was a ridiculous 8hrs– my previous laptop got 2.5hrs at best and I used to think that was an accomplishment. Power wise I never ran into any hiccups. The stability was solid. OSX was easy to adopt to as a full-time OS and I was on my merry way.

Except one, tiny, problem.

I hate using a laptop if I don’t have to. Whenever I was home I plugged right into a much bigger screen, an external keyboard, and mouse and sat a desk to use my computer. Call me old-fashioned, but I have never been as comfortable working on a laptop as I am using a separate keyboard, mouse, and monitor. And laptop speakers? Don’t even get me started.

Now none of this would be a problem because I used my laptop on the go. At the time I purchased my machine, I was just coming off of five years of school, during which I constantly worked in libraries, coffee shops, friends houses, etc. I also had worked as a consultant at several places over the past year, so bringing my workstation with me on the go was a necessity. One month after I got my laptop, I was working a normal desk job but was assigned a desktop from the stone age that was barely functional. I found myself doing a significant amount of my work on my personal laptop that I brought with me from home. But about six months ago, my job purchased me a new desktop that was blazing fast. I work with confidential data virtually all day long, which was a huge hassle when I used an old machine. I often performed various data management activities with no more than one application open on my work computer, prepare the data in non-confidential format, and ship it off to my laptop for more in-depth analysis. The workflow was atrocious. Having a functional desktop made it pointless to bring my laptop to work– most of what I do couldn’t be done on a personal machine anyway. So while my workflow became much more efficient, my laptop lost utility. More and more I found myself simply leaving my laptop plugged in at my desk at home and operating it like a desktop. Fast forward to today and I fried my battery, which now holds only 3-4 hours of charge and I haven’t used my laptop as a portable computer in months.

I decided I should sell my laptop and replace it with a Mac Mini, which brings me to the title of this post. Perhaps the most pleasant experience I’ve had on any computer since I first used a Gateway 2000 c. 1992 came from using Apple’s Migration Assistant. Upon turning on my Mac Mini for the first time, the setup wizard offered  the opportunity to transfer files and settings from another computer. Now this is a feature that browsers and other software have offered for years and the experience has never been all that useful to me. But this time I decided to try it and I plugged my laptop into my Mac Mini using an ethernet cable. Approximate 2 hours later my Mac Mini restarted and the experience was breathtaking.

Everything, and I mean everything, transferred over to my new computer. All my applications were installed. All of my settings, including those made by software like Onyx and Geek Tool, transferred over. All my documents were where I left them. The experience was indistinguishable from logging onto my laptop.

This is an astonishingly great and useful feature. It seems so simple in theory, but execution can easily be botched. Apple hit a home run with Migration Assistant, at least as of the version that comes standard in Lion.

Ultimately, my experience with Migration Assistant, along with the great resale value on my Macbook Pro, has pretty much ensured that my next computer will be an Apple.

Tonight, I went to a public meeting run by Providence’s Department of Planning and Development. A few of upfront observations:

1. The folks who work for the Department of Planning and Development (DPD) were professional, kind, and capable, as was the consultants who worked with them. They maintained decorum and a genuine sense of openness even though there was a clear tension in the room between some outspoken (and knowledgeable) community members and activists who had clearly participated in many past meetings.
2. The ideas presented for the Knowledge District demonstrated thoughtful, albeit top-down, considerations for the space that showed a remarkable respect for the complexity, size, and importance of the project. I also felt that the DPD and their consultants got all the big ideas right and that they were quite familiar with the community they were re-imagining.
3. Despite some great big ideas, there are really important details that are worth memorializing that the DPD is missing. In part, maybe this is because they’re simply not at that deep a stage. I’m hopeful that the purpose of the public meetings was not just to get feedback on the big concepts (which seem largely unassailable), but to make sure they get the details right from the people who live and interact with these neighborhoods daily.
4. There are some clear areas of consensus among the engaged community, both positive and negative. At times, this consensus suggest that the state, city, and institutions (business, education, health, etc) have very different goals than the community. ∫ Here’s my summary of what the community had to say:

Folks want to get rid of surface parking lots and move towards more parking structures. It’s very clear that everyone feels these surface lots contribute to the desolate feel of the Jewelry District and hospital area, as well as acting as an extra barrier (beyond the highways) to connecting the Knowledge District to the rest of the city. People want to see mixed-use, with real action on the street level and residences and offices on higher floors. Everyone wants better sight lines to draw people into the Jewelry district and wants to see green space embraced, not solely through a park on the water but intimately placed directly on the streets as trees and other landscaping. People cited Chestnut and Richmond Street  several times as strong streets that acted as the main arteries by which Downcity and the Jewelry District connect. It seems that there is broad agreement that there a reason needs to exist to draw pedestrians into this neighborhood from Downcity, Fox Point, and Upper South Providence if we’re going to have a vital, 24/7 community. There was also pretty broad acceptance of higher buildings being constructed along I-95 and keeping large footprint buildings out of the Jewelry District.

Most of the more negative tone of the evening came from two core issues– the need for more residential development, something that’s not seen as high priority or even on the radar of most public officials, and funding. I’ll start with funding. There are serious concerns that even if the plans are perfect and great, a total lack of municipal, state, and federal funding for the foreseeable future places major risks on central aspects of the DPD’s plans. How can we fund a large, sweeping greenway and inviting, beautiful streets? How can we fund restoring vital roadways absorbed by bad planning in the past? How can we upkeep the parks people crave or build vital family institutions like schools without any public funding? How will we repurpose landmark buildings like the Dynamo House that has sat vacant even though it’s so full of potential? There is a serious sense that all the projects that serve as good models for the Knowledge District required considerable public infrastructure investment that’s just not available now. Sadly, to truly “fix” the Knowledge District will require not just one large project, but several major improvements. I saw little optimism for the proposed Streetcar/light rail system that RIPTA is championing. Some of that was disbelief that it could ever be funded, and some of that was disbelief the streetcar was a solution to a real problem. There’s also little optimism that the proposed pedestrian bridge to connect Fox Point to the Jewelry District is going to happen. Everyone begrudged that DPD had little real authority to make anything happen. Zoning is an absolute disgrace in Providence, particularly this area. But even substantially improving the zoning and regulations around development won’t actually make sure the projects are mindful of the projects wider goals. More to the point, it’s still unclear how Providence can simply use the name “Knowledge District” to bring in the kind of development needed. There is serious consternation that the entire “Knowledge District” concept is selling something that doesn’t exist and won’t have the infrastructure to attract folks. Without the promise of big public infrastructure improvements, developers are going to play the “wait and see” game.

Residential development is another important aspect of what the community members craved. It was immediately clear that the desire of folks at this meeting was to have a 24/7 neighborhood with mixed-uses, including several calls (from residents, no less) to include low-income and affordable housing. There is strong dislike of the name “Knowledge District”, especially if it supplants the Jewelry District (which is a subset of the area in question). No one feels that this name captures what they want to use the space for, and no one felt the name had any real meaning. Folks believed that “Knowledge District” was as empty marketing that would have no real longterm staying power. But really, this goes beyond a bad name. The members of the community who met with DPD tonight clearly believe that residential development has taken a major backseat to institutional expansion and large business development. My interpretation was that the community felt that lawmakers were simply hoping that big groups like the hospitals, Brown University, Johnson and Wales, and some yet-to-be-named mid-sized businesses would snap up parcels and build massive buildings that would fill with jobs. First, they believed this vision was largely a fiction (again, see the hesitation folks had that businesses of any remarkable size would take on the development costs and move to Providence without the public infrastructure investments). Second, these kinds of buildings were not what the community envisioned, particularly for the Jewelry District area that already has much smaller plot sizes and lower building heights. What I heard, rather clearly, was that the sea of parking lots around the hospital and the area with raised highway along I-95 was fair game for the behemoth buildings most lawmakers are picturing for the entire project. But the interior of the Knowledge District has to be filled in with a place that people want to live, play and work in (in that order).

I hope to write some more on my thoughts on developing this area in the future. I generally agree with the comments from the community above, but I have a bit more optimism and a bit more faith. Overall, I was really happy with how DPD is framing this project. They are very consciously thinking about distinct portions of the Knowledge District and respecting their differences while simultaneously ensuring cohesion and setting strong, wider goals.

I just hope we get a damn grocery store and dramatically cut down on surface lots. More on that later.