The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

December 29, 2013 at 9:30 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
  • Theda Skocpol on the Tea Party’s awful hold on US politics.
    QUOTE
    Here is the key point: Even though there is no one center of Tea Party authority—indeed, in some ways because there is no one organized center—the entire gaggle of grassroots and elite organizations amounts to a pincer operation that wields money and primary votes to exert powerful pressure on Republican officeholders and candidates. Tea Party influence does not depend on general popularity at all. Even as most Americans have figured out that they do not like the Tea Party or its methods, Tea Party clout has grown in Washington and state capitals. Most legislators and candidates are Nervous Nellies, so all Tea Party activists, sympathizers, and funders have had to do is recurrently demonstrate their ability to knock off seemingly unchallengeable Republicans (ranging from Charlie Crist in Florida to Bob Bennett of Utah to Indiana’s Richard Lugar). That grabs legislators’ attention and results in either enthusiastic support for, or acquiescence to, obstructive tactics. The entire pincer operation is further enabled by various right-wing tracking organizations that keep close count of where each legislator stands on “key votes”—including even votes on amendments and the tiniest details of parliamentary procedure, the kind of votes that legislative leaders used to orchestrate in the dark.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: theda_skocpol usa politics tea_party

  • Agree.
    QUOTE
    “You recognize that you’re going in blind, that there’s no model,” Snowden said, acknowledging that he had no way to know whether the public would share his views.

    “But when you weigh that against the alternative, which is not to act,” he said, “you realize that some analysis is better than no analysis. Because even if your analysis proves to be wrong, the marketplace of ideas will bear that out. If you look at it from an engineering perspective, an iterative perspective, it’s clear that you have to try something rather than do nothing.”
    UNQUOTE

    tags: edward_snowden nsa democracy

  • Urban noise/ traffic noise *is* horrible.
    QUOTE
    The long-term health effects of noise in modern cities are only beginning to be understood, although anyone who has ever lived in a city knows intuitively how stressful the constant din of motorized traffic can be. The new wall at Brooklyn Bridge Park provides a bit of respite from the assault. But it’s only a few hundred feet long. Its greater value may be in the way it makes us aware of the destructive and unpleasant sonic reality we take for granted every day.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: atlantic_cities bqe highways parks noise_barriers liveability

  • Slideshow documenting the transformation of a surface parking lot into an urban infill development complete with bioswale for cleaning run-off to a creek that has seasonal salmon runs. The architects, Mithun, are among the good guys.

    tags: slideshow seattle malls parking surface_parking_lots urban_development

  • Eye-opening…
    QUOTE
    Google, for one, would love to build housing near its campus in Mountain View. They have tried to get it permitted and it has been rejected, while at the same time the city has approved additional office space. In fact, the city of Mountain View expressly forbade housing in its citywide general plan for the area around the Bayshore Campus. This would have put large numbers of Google employees walking distance from work, while also providing a walkable neighborhood near a light rail station. Google has also started investing in affordable housing, including one project in Mountain View, but unfortunately it’s only 51 units. The truth is that suburban communities don’t want to build more housing, and Prop 13 gives existing owners little reason to care about increasing housing prices.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: san_francisco google buses public_infrastructure suburbs planning zoning

  • Cool, but double-edged forces here, too…
    QUOTE
    There’s a strain of thinking afoot, embodied in the Tea Party, that pushes for restricting government to the barest of services. This has played out most recently in the idea that the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) is doomed because government cannot pull off something that complex. At the same time, there’s a clamor for the private sector to get involved in the sort of activities we once limited to government.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: airbnb third_places spaces san_francisco libraries

  • On the benefits of walking.
    QUOTE
    Garrison emphasized that walking should be a natural part of our daily lives, rather than something we add on specifically for exercise, health or recreation. “I have the pleasure of walking every day to the store, the dry cleaners, the post office, to the park with my husband. That’s no accident,” she said. It’s the result of deliberate urban planning that locates important destinations within walking distance —a traditional common-sense idea called walkability, which is at the heart of making our communities more safe, comfortable and convenient for walking.

    “Walkable communities are the key to a strong American Third Century,” observed Tyler Norris. “They help protect us from spiraling health care costs in great part driven by preventable chronic disease, while creating vibrant communities that are fonts of equitable prosperity.”
    UNQUOTE

    tags: project_for_public_spaces jay_walljasper walkability walking health happiness

  • Good point(s)…
    QUOTE
    By the same token, if micro-apartments are indeed the wave of the future, Saegert argues, they increase the “ground rent,” or dollar per square foot that a developer earns and comes to expect from his investment. So over time, New Yorkers may actually face more expensive housing, paying the same amount to rent a studio in the neighborhood where they used to be able to afford a one-bedroom. With the gradual erosion of zoning rules, the micro-apartment could very well become the unit of the future, the only viable choice for a large number of renters.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: microhomes crowding apartments nyc atlantic_cities

  • QUOTE
    But even John Mackey, the Whole Foods C.E.O., has acknowledged his company’s knack for identifying neighborhoods on the cusp of gentrification. In an interview with CNNMoney in 2007, Mackey said, “The joke is that we could have made a lot more money just buying up real estate around our stores and developing it than we could make selling groceries.” What’s more, Mackey is a staunch libertarian and free-market devotee, as Nick Paumgarten wrote in a 2010 New Yorker Profile, and his attacks on unions and government-supported health care have alienated some of his liberal customers.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: gentrification newyorker elizabeth_greenspan brooklyn whole_foods

  • Agree.
    QUOTE
    Coal plants have put far more radioactive emissions into the air than the world’s 430-plus nuclear plants ever have.

    If a nuke so much as burps, the authorities in many countries close it. But coal plants as well as coal and gas producers have for years been free to radiate in plumes (modern scrubbers may be minimizing the amount). Their emissions include things like uranium, thorium, potassium 40, radon, radium and others. Mutter those words in a nuclear context, and you’ve got a posse of angry mothers on your doorstep. From the fossil fuel industry, those same radioactive elements fall on deaf ears as they land silently in public lungs.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: coal japan nuclear_power pollution smartplanet

  • QUOTE
    A safer city street will trade long, indirect crosswalks for shorter crossings and pedestrian islands.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: street_usage safety pedestrians atlantic_cities eric_jaffe

  • QUOTE
    New-old architecture is like a magnet for the Tea Party. Its leaders invariably live in suburban McMansions of various sizes, built recently but gussied up to look old and distinguished. A recent news reports showed a pro-immigration reform group staging a rally at one politician’s house. It looked like a flock of zombies descending on a generic American homestead in a Walking Dead episode.

    New-new architecture is a no-no, however. Anything innovative or vaguely European-looking is abhorrent.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: nimbyism tea_party architecture smartplanet modernism

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

December 22, 2013 at 4:30 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
  • Some excellent points in this article (see quote extract), but also so many contradictions/ so much wrong. E.g., there’s a trickle-down supposition (if you build more housing stock, prices will fall): in desirable urban centers, however, that doesn’t seem to happen (enough). Then, a praise for the super-talls (b/c they’re also super-thins), but at the same time a recognition of the street wall (which you can’t have with a super-tall, at least not in that recognizable way). And so on…
    QUOTE
    Tall buildings need to create not only an aesthetic contribution to the skyline but also street-level value so they’re more likely to be embraced. But we also need to prioritize what we’re building tall: Right now, housing, in any form, should be encouraged, and cities need to work harder to allow this kind of development to occur.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: allissa_walker gizmodo skyscrapers cities urbanism los_angeles

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

December 15, 2013 at 10:04 am | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

December 8, 2013 at 9:08 pm | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)
  • This “street area calculator” could be really useful in determining context-specific redevelopment…
    QUOTE
    Price has created a “street area calculator,” that allows you to plug in a street width and block size. Using this tool, you can come up with some basic figures to compare different grids and how they apportion a city’s land. To take two of the extreme examples calculated by Price using rough figures gleaned from Google maps, Portland, Oregon, has streets that are 60 feet wide (building face to building face, including the sidewalk) and blocks that are 200 by 200. Compare that to Salt Lake City, where the streets are 130 feet wide and the block are 660 by 660.

    These configurations mean that Salt Lake is using its space more efficiently by one measure, with only 30.2 percent of area devoted to streets, which must be maintained and are not “productive” in terms of tax revenue. Portland, in contrast devotes nearly 41 percent of its area to streets. Most street space goes to cars, with sidewalks taking up a relatively small fraction.

    But when you look at how much street frontage a city’s grid creates within a half-mile walk of a certain point – one potential measure of walkability – Portland has nearly 160,000 feet, while Salt Lake has just under 60,000.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: street_usage street_grid andrew_price atlantic_cities

  • More than 10 years ago I said that continually pumping more PhD graduates into a rapidly downsizing job market, as academic leaders everywhere were doing, was immoral. This excellent essay backs me up from yet another angle.
    QUOTE
    The academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders. Even if the probability that you might get shot in academia is relatively small (unless you mark student papers very harshly), one can observe similar dynamics. Academia is only a somewhat extreme example of this trend, but it affects labour markets virtually everywhere. One of the hot topics in labour market research at the moment is what we call “dualisation”[3]. Dualisation is the strengthening of this divide between insiders in secure, stable employment and outsiders in fixed-term, precarious employment. Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail[4].
    UNQUOTE

    tags: academia alexandre_afonso socialcritique

  • I just started reading Vaclav Smil’s latest book. Good stuff.
    QUOTE
    His conclusions are often bleak. He argues, for instance, that the demise of US manufacturing dooms the country not just intellectually but creatively, because innovation is tied to the process of making things. (And, unfortunately, he has the figures to back that up.)
    UNQUOTE

    tags: vaclav_smil wired_magazine manufacturing economysocialcritique

  • The real reasoning behind Amazon’s drones?
    QUOTE
    …if Amazon can become the first company with significant resources to invest in consumer drones, it could corner the market on cheap unmanned aerial vehicles the way it’s cornering the market on cheap computing power. And so far, investors have rewarded Bezos for putting long-term, wide-ranging ambition before short-term profits. Which means that however distant they are right now from Amazon’s core business, drones could become a much larger part of it.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: amazon drones quartz

  • This article is about planning and placemaking and stuff, and also deeply philosophical. Good read.
    QUOTE
    When I covered sports as a newspaper reporter, I got into a discussion with a highly successful football coach about his obsession with control. By the time a coach reaches the upper tiers of his profession, he or she has experienced hundreds of ways to lose. So they become students of failure, of where they missed opportunities to choose a better way to prepare a team or respond in a game situation. They hate surprises, even though they can’t think of many contests where they weren’t surprised at some point. They know that talented players will at some crucial moments in a contest improvise with success, perhaps even with game-winning success. But that’s not something they can control. And coaches are control freaks. So they drill their teams for near-instinctual responses to situations in order, they hope, to minimize the necessity for innovation. To control what’s within their power to control.

    I remember what the football coach told me about strategies for optimizing flexibility, for withholding commitment to rules, for keeping an open mind. “Well, I guess an open mind can be a good thing,” he told me. “But you have to be careful that your mind’s not so open that your brains fall out.”
    UNQUOTE

    tags: flexibility predictability planning placemakers

  • We knew this already (well, some of us did), but this article is really worth a close read.
    QUOTE
    This points to an emerging disaster in street psychology. As suburban retailers begin to colonize central cities, block after block of bric-a-brac and mom-and-pop-scale buildings and shops are being replaced by blank, cold spaces that effectively bleach street edges of conviviality. It is an unnecessary act of theft, and its consequences go beyond aesthetics, or even the massive reduction in the variety of goods and services that results when one giant retailer takes over a block. The big-boxing of a city block harms the physical health of people living nearby, especially the elderly. Seniors who live among long stretches of dead frontage have actually been found to age more quickly than those who live on blocks with plenty of doors, windows, porch stoops, and destinations. Because supersize architecture and blank stretches of sidewalk push their daily destinations beyond walking distance, they get weaker and slower, they socialize less outside the home, and they volunteer less. Studies of seniors living in Montreal found that elderly people who lived on blocks that had front porches and stoops actually had stronger legs and hands than those living on more barren blocks. Meanwhile, those who could actually walk to shops and services were more likely to volunteer, visit other people, and stay active.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: atlantic_cities street_appeal cities biophilia facades built_environment charles_montgomery

  • Powerful article.
    QUOTE
    Perhaps the greatest danger today is that of fatalist apathy. People do not think there is a viable alternative. They are wrong.

    On the technological side, techniques such as anonymization and pseudonymization allow the development of personalized services that don’t invade privacy on a mass scale – yes, targeted investigations can extricate identifying information out of such masked data, but we want targeted investigations to remain possible. Indiscriminate dragnet surveillance is the problem here.

    Technologists and developers need to implement privacy by design. They need to minimize the data they collect, because their advances are the very tools that can be turned against people. They need to mask that data where they can, and make it 100 percent clear to their users what data is being collected, why it’s being collected, and what’s going to happen to it. Also, we need encryption everywhere.
    UNQUOTE

    tags: privacy surveillance gigaom police_state

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

But grandma, what big teeth you have…

December 7, 2013 at 6:11 pm | In yulelogStories | 2 Comments

Had to go to the mall this afternoon – what a nightmare. Store upon same store, selling the same stuff over and over again …it was like Kafka meets Dante in one of those hellish circles. In the course of my twenty minutes there, I amused myself by taking photos of some of the advertising in store windows. Specifically, I took photos of the always toothy smiling women. Here’s the collage:

The lipstick model’s smile is actually not as outrageously big as the bright red lip color makes it seem. But check out the extreme chompers on the model at the top left, as well as the image directly below her. And what about the trio of ladies, top right? That seems to be Christy Turlington (?) on the left, whose bite seems positively velociraptor-ish. The Asian model next to her has a smaller enameled area, and instead displays an alarming expanse of pink gums.

I remember a time before Julia Roberts (who, we all know, has a perfect smile) when it didn’t seem necessary for every model to have quite such a huge abundance of dental matter. A smile didn’t have to be – what’s the word?, “incandescent,” I believe they call it? But we’re all Americans and therefore more of a good thing is always better. Therefore, what was merely incandescent yesterday must today be positively atomic, radioactive, literally radiant, blow your mind big. ‘Cause bigger is always better, right?

Perhaps we used to think only of horses as having huge teeth – and maybe of chimpanzees, too. Maybe we didn’t see chimps on an everyday basis, but lots of Europeans (and Americans of yore) saw horses a lot, as well as mules and donkeys and asses, all of which have gigantic teeth. And often those animals only showed their teeth when they were frightened or about to bite.

So how is it that we now want all women to look like this? Disclaimer: I’m not saying these models aren’t beautiful. They are beautiful; they have beautiful teeth. But, is it just me, or does all that toothiness sometimes starts to look a little scary? Just a bit? My point-of-departure here is that such a biting display of dental prowess didn’t become the norm until fairly recently, and I can’t help but marvel at how quickly the norms have changed. A big mouth used to be considered a flaw. No more.

Here’s a great article, The Serious and the Smirk: The Smile in Portraiture, which puts the smile into an art historical context (e.g., “…in the long history of portraiture the open smile has been largely, as it were, frowned upon.”). (n.b.: art history is good; you learn tons of stuff.)

Anyway. There you have it, a small collage of big teeth. And here are some quotes and links about women or teeth or smiles (or all three). Enjoy.

…it is suggested that whilst the teeth of both sexes act as human ornament displays, the female display is more complex because it additionally signals residual reproductive value. (source)

Within female saints’ legends the tortured body parts are often sexualized and utterlygendered. Thus, this paper will argue that the gorge and its components are not only treated asa “door” through which beliefs and vocation are uttered, but also metaphorically as a vagina or vagina dentata. The teeth play a crucial role as they function as the only visible barrier  between inner and outer body, as a symbolic “hymen”, which is “deflowered” in the legend of St. Apollonia among others by pulling the teeth out. Within the legends of female saints – mouth and vagina – the two culturally established entrances to a woman’s body seem to beused interchangeably. (source)

…the Victorians thought of open-mouthed smiling as obscene, and nineteenth-century English and American slang equated “smiling” with drinking whisky. (source)

In animals, the exposure of teeth, which may bear a resemblance to a smile and imply happiness, often conveys other signals. The baring of teeth is often used as a threat or warning display—known as a snarl—or a sign of submission. For chimpanzees, it can also be a sign of fear. (source)

On one hand, it goes without saying that teeth are signals and status symbols. One of the first things people will say about a lower-class person is that they are either missing teeth (typically mentioned of whites) or are wearing grills or gold caps (typically mentioned of blacks). And rich people and nearly all celebrities get extensive work done on their teeth.  Having good teeth is so important to perceived sexual and overall social attraction that it affects peoples’ ability to get jobs. (source)

Smiling makes its entry into Western art primarily in the Renaissance “vanitas” paintings depicting the folly of human existence and the temptations of the flesh, from sex to gambling to cheating, observes Richard Estelle, a Philadelphia artist who, along with his wife, Camille Ward, has studied the art history of smiles. The only folks grinning in those pictures are the fools about to have their wallets lifted or their money taken by cardsharps. To the old masters, smiles were for losers. (source)

The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

December 1, 2013 at 8:52 pm | In links | Comments Off on The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

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