Blog

west-ends-lesson-mayor-wu

snippets

When incomes are similar, those of different backgrounds tend to get along, would be valuable and sought-after But an emphasis on achieving “affordability” through subsidized “mixed-income” complexes risks Logue-style hubris public ownership and management, advocates of subsidized mixed-income housing, relax zoning to allow builders to create naturally-occurring affordable housing based on a time-honored formula of small homes on small lots. Low-income neighborhoods can and should be good neighborhoods — so long as city governments ensure safe and clean streets and effective schools

Using the story of the West End as an argument against 'subsidized “mixed-income” complexes' is initially intriguing. Renovating public housing like The Mildred Haley Apartments - Bromley Park, however, will be very good for Jamaica Plain and the city. But this is hardly the entirety of Mayor Wu's housing policies. They cover a wide range of initiatives spanning affordable rentals to first-time home ownership. By painting Wu as at risk for "Logue-style hubris", Husock uncovers his own agenda which is, in itself, troubling. His solution is to "relax zoning". That's what the developers of the West End convinced the city to do. It does not get you "naturally-occurring affordable housing". The role of the government is not to modestly "provide basic city services " for developers to exploit. A democratically elected government should not be denigrated as "centrally directed". There is a role for government in dampening the excesses of a "free" market and there is a role of regulation in creating the framework for a built environment of character and diversity, accessible to all its residents.

MLK day

'I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is... the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom...Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.' Letter from a Birmingham Jail 16 April 1963

NFL refs, 401K plans, screwing new workers and the middle class

Perhaps the unions deserve to die. They bring on their own demise. As soon as you make a decision that protects existing workers while reducing benefits for new hires you are done. By agreeing to bar new workers from defined benefit retirement plans you lose the high ground. Now you are just sitting ducks allowing management to take pot shots to reduce the expensive workforce. (They call it evaluations.)

It's not just the NFL refs union. Unions have been reduced to solely protecting existing members. As a force to right the imbalances of predator capitalism and restore and protect a middle class they are impotent.

401K plans suck compared to defined benefit plans. I you've got on you know. There just a big pool of money that gets plundered every ten years or so, cleaned out by the financial sector as part of bursting bubbles.

All the value that was defined benefit plans has left the middle class and moved up the food chain to the investors class. Its easy, just under-fund the plans, say 'oh no' and then claim the money for your stockholders.

Where are the 99%? Watching football complaining about the refs. Where is the media? Writing about football complaining about the refs. Coverage never rises to to a level that asks how this very public controversy relates to all of our lives, to the bigger picture of the dissolution of the middle class by fat-cat business men used to getting their way. Nobody want to mess with that. We are all stars in our own fantasy league, complicit in our own destruction.

Please consider disciplines that cannot (or can hardly) be learnt by oneself - where there is a gap between self taught students and master graduates.

Is it Economics, Computer Science, Law, Arts, Astronomy or any other disciplines ?Edit

Hmm, one can hardly claim mastery just by graduating. Formal education is just an introduction to topics that could take up to a lifetime to master.

I suppose we pay for the value we can afford.

The most valuable element in it all is a great teacher. They inspire and beguile us, set the bar and plot the exploration, answer the questions and pose them. Great teachers aren't available to all of us. Often, we can't afford them.

Self taught is a misnomer, none of us are; we just aren't in a formal class. We still read and research materials that we did not develop. Online even offers the chance to interact. The sciences and engineering need tools to keep you from getting stuck, lots and lots of worked out problems. Every discipline needs good questions to ponder, a way to refine your understanding, make it precise.

I suppose we can't dismiss that some of what we learn from a teacher is by watching interactions between that teacher and other students and between students, the social component.

Thank God for StackExchange. When a Khan academy topic is sufficiently narrow, a short video lecture can be brilliant. I'm rooting for edX.

The blog hasn't had a facelift in a long time.

setup

Moved wp is so broken. What is the overall theory of directories, permalinks, rewrite rules and front page displays?

when I changed servers I decided to put my old wp in its own directory. I followed http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory, read about http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks as well as http://codex.wordpress.org/Creating_a_Static_Front_Page. Some how I have gotten things in a terrible convoluted state. I am in an infinite loop of change in .htaccess, index.php, permalinks and static pages with something always left broken. I need to know the concept instead of following 'copy don't move this' , 'update your permalinks that'.

It might be a problem that I named the subdirectory 'blog'.

The state right now is: I can get to wp-admin (whew). The site loads but not with the static page but with the blogposts. It shows the blogposts but if I click on a particular blog post it 404's. Tags and categories 404 too. The state of the settings is:
in root:

index.php is

<?php
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('.blog/wp-blog-header.php');
?>

.htaccess is

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www.)?sitebuilt.net$
RewriteRule ^(/)?$ blog [L]
# END WordPress
</IfModule>

in /blog:

index.php is:

<?php
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>

.htaccess is

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

settings->permalinks is /%postname%/

pages->static_homepage is called 'home', the permalink is http://www/sitebuilt.net and it won't let me change it.

pages->place-holder_for_posts is called 'blogposts' and its permalink is http://www/sitebuilt.net/blogposts

With this setup permalinks are right off the hostname and it can't find them. I've changes stuff so permalinks say http://www.sitebuilt.net/blog/mypost and it still can't find them. Where are they? What's the theory of operation?

topics

cool companies

cool ideas

cool technology

occupy

drafts

Renewable energy program called unfair as lawmakers debate its expansion

Something fishy about David Abel's story on wind and solar energy. He seems to be purposely calling everything a subsidy when actually there are two things going on here, one a subsidy to get alternative energy systems off the ground and two the energy produced as a result of that subsidy.

Right now in Massachusetts you can put panels on your roof, run it through an inverter and connect to a breaker in your panel. If you are using less energy than your panels are producing your meter starts running backwards and you are feeding power to the grid. In effect you become a producer, if the rate is .17$/KWH you are getting credited that for every kilowatt hour your solar panels produce.

Things get really interesting as utilities move to a smart grid with different rates for peak and off-peak. I'm in a pilot program with NSTAR; for 20 hours of the day my rates are less than yours: .12$/KWH vs your .17$/KWH. But during the recent heat wave I was notified of a Critical Peak price of .95$/KWH, 8 times as much as off-peak.

If I had had panels on my roof they would have been humming during the 12-5 bright hot critical period and at .95$/KWH I would have been making some serious money producing electricity to run all those air conditioners downtown.

Maybe the real story is that big business and utility companies have a problem with that.

So Abel writes this story about how utility companies, the chamber of commerce, utility representatives and business groups are concerned about fairness to regular folks, arguing that its not fair since you have to be pretty wealthy to put panels on your roof. This is when my BS detector started ringing like crazy. Since when has big business and utility corporations ever cared for those of modest means. In an ironic twist the argument proceeds to call into question all subsidies for alternative energy that go to small producers. So now even fewer of us have a shot a being producers. That's even fairer in utility speak, with John as Abel utility spokesperson.

We need to recognize the enormous subsidies that have gone, and continue to go to, the fossil fuel / nuclear energy industry, and, start to quantify the environmental costs of non-renewable sources. Against that we need to balance a policy that serves to put in place clean energy sources where you don't have to continually refill the tank; once they are up and running they produce free energy.

A clear policy might be as follows:

On the federal level keep in place tax credits for both large scale and small scale non-fossil fuel clean energy production. Instead of placing a tariff on China solar panels, match China's subsidies for buying any US made panel.

On a local level continue to work with utilities to make the costs of our energy more transparent on a day to day, hour to hour basis. Encourage a smart grid in which if you can do your part to contribute during times of peak usage, you receive the full benefit of your contribution. Extend subsidies so that anyone with a roof facing south can get in the production business.

As consumers we should beware of Boston Globe articles that obfuscate the issues playing the upper middle class against the middle class and the poor meanwhile serving the interests of big utilities and their rich stockholders. Don't believe that big business or elected officials have the interest of the poor and middle class at heart. Strive to take control over your energy usage and be wary of schemes in which you sign away your power as a producer to some company that gets to use your roof for chump change.

The subsidy part is the federal money that gives you a 30% tax credit for doing so and a state program that every once in a while opens up with additional subsidy paid for by the .0005$/KWH charge on your electric bill.

receive a little-known subsidy

The surcharge on customers who do not feed into the grid has become increasingly controversial as state lawmakers this month hash out the language in a bill that would double the amount of power that utility companies could buy from those producing their own energy

Utility companies across the country have become more vocal about the burdens of net metering programs, which exist in at least 40 states and generally require utilities to pay the independent power producers the same amount the utilities charge to supply energy to everyone else. The utilities, however, complain that the rates they pay power producers do not factor in the cost of storing and delivering the power, which they end up passing on to others in the form of a surcharge.

As lawmakers debate whether to raise the cap on the state’s so-called net metering program to 6 percent of the maximum amount of electricity that utilities can produce on days when demand peaks, utility representatives, business groups, and ratepayer advocates have raised concerns about the fairness of continuing a program designed to spark the growth of solar and wind power, which are now being adopted more rapidly.

front page

more like an about me page

Sitebuilt.net is a portal to Tim McKenna's <a href="http://sitebuilt.net/wiki">w</a>eb sites and other stuff. Sitebuilt (Systems Inc.) was the name of the <a title="house building" href="http://sitebuilt.net/sitebuilt-houses-2" target="_self">house building</a> company I ran for thirty years.

What is cool about being in business

I always liked working with people who had some money in the deal. Having an economic stake in the outcome of a project engendered a cooperative spirit and a productive atmosphere. On a construction site there may be six or eight separate companies working at the same time. The developer, architect, owner, the contractor and subcontractor all have an interest in a successful project. The non-profit and government world is a [slidingnote title="messier place." type="closeable"] Motivations can become muddied and efficiency is no longer driven by the potential for a bigger payout. People can sometimes create little fiefdoms or tend to protect their territory or power. Productivity isn't as important and it is harder to measure.[/slidingnote]

Competition does seem to be part of the human character. Competition can motivate, increase efficiency and create innovation. To effectively compete you must have skills in cooperation and teamwork.

Building stuff

I derive enormous satisfaction in building things. I would turn drawings on paper into 3 dimensional spaces. As you gain experience your drawings become more creative because your ability to visualize improves. Your design can become more adventurous. Ted Howry built spiral staircases. A long time ago he showed me AutoCAD running on DOS. I used AutoCAD to create 3D models and then wrote Lisp code to create all the pieces and draw them and send them to a database. As long as we stayed +/- 1/4" as we framed, you could cut the all the roof parts before the second floor was even framed. It would work out. Computer code let you create things out of [slidingnote title="thin air." type="closeable"]

When you build second house you actually have to physically build it. Once you write a program to do something, when you want to do it again you just press a button. Fascinating. You write a program to save you a half an hour of bookkeeping a day and end up freeing up almost 200 hours a year. You can spend that time body-surfing or fishing in Boston Harbor. [/slidingnote]

In the technology lab where I worked at BU as a PhD student we built models of vision and recognition and tried them out on images, mostly satellite images. We shared a code repository and kept project notes on a wiki. Later when started teaching I used wikis as my core technology. I worked in newly minted innovative school where every student had a [slidingnote title="laptop." type="closeable"] Mostly they looked at shoe ads and surfed BestBuy and chatted. I had to do something.[/slidingnote] I put my classes online, gave each student an account, left it wide open, everybody could see or even edit over everybody else. I wrote my lesson plans on the wiki and students wrote their papers there. They took notes and collected stuff in their wiki pages as well. What happened was transformative. Sixteen year old kids are actively forming their identity and working at creating and finding their own unique style. For these kids their writing became part of their style. Since their peers could see what they wrote, they started writing for their peers. You could say 'You gotta check out what Norbert wrote on Rousseau' and by the end of the day everybody had.

I became a hacker. Fridays a few of us would write code to extend what Mediawiki or Moodle could do. Recently I have tried to round out my [slidingnote title="skills," type="closeable"] to move from PHP creating pages to more of a model/view/controller framework, exploring HTML5, javascipt and JQuery and web application that can work on mobile devices. I didn't love Ruby on Rails, think I'll try Python instead. Recently I moved my sites from a VPS to an EC2 instance on AWS. I might try some NOSQL. I've started to put my prototype code up on <a href="https://github.com/mckennatim">github.</a> [/slidingnote] I'd like to continue to work with transformative technology, create new models of learning, take advantage the potential broader shared market as Common Core Standards are adopted nationwide. I want to support a bottom-up approach to education reform and empower students and teachers with new tools.

We have to re-claim our democracy and recreate a healthy middle class

Since Reagan, the chasm between the top 1% and everyone else has been ever widening. My first experience of how it worked was back in 1986 and the Savings and Loan crisis. I was building a dozen houses a year back then and worked with a good group of subcontractors. Here's how it went: 1) There was a bailout. 2) Investors and banks got bailed out. 3) Subcontractors owed money got nothing.

My 401K gets drained every 8-10 years as the playing field is tilted and bubbles are created and then burst. It's happened to most of the middle class.

There are better ways to educate our kids

For six years starting in 2005 I taught in Boston Public Schools at a district high school. It pretty much fit the profile of a "failing" urban school: a very large percentage of students who a) qualified for free lunch, b)would be the first in the family to attend college, c)did poorly on standardized tests, d)were ESL students e)were special needs students. What I discovered surprised me. These kids were as bright as the Boston Latin kids. So why did they do so terribly on tests? Why did they have such trouble reading and writing? How come they couldn't solve a problem they hadn't already seen? <a title="education" href="http://sitebuilt.net/education" target="_self"> more</a> 

In the picture <a href="http://sitebuilt.net/noah">Noah</a> is taking a picture of the rest of the <a href="http://sitebuilt.net/family" target="_self">family</a> as we climb to meet him on a hill near Bamenda in <a href="http://sitebuilt.net/cameroon">Cameroon</a>. Peri is in the center, I'm on the right, Toby is behind Ari. I was on a Christmas break from my <a href="http://www.sitebuilt.net/wiki/Resume">job</a> as a <a href="http://www.pathboston.com/hum4/On_teaching">teacher</a> at <a href="http://www.pathboston.com/hum4">PATH</a>.

What is cool about being in business

I always liked working with people who had some money in the deal. Having an economic stake in the outcome of a project engendered a cooperative spirit and a productive atmosphere. On a construction site there may be six or eight separate companies working at the same time. The developer, architect, owner, the contractor and subcontractor all have an interest in a successful project. The non-profit and government world is a [slidingnote title="messier place" type="closeable"]. Motivations can become muddied and efficiency is no longer driven by the potential for a bigger payout. People can sometimes create little fiefdoms or tend to protect their territory or power. Productivity isn't as important.[/slidingnote]

Competition does seem to be part of the human character. Competition can motivate, increase efficiency and create innovation. To effectively compete you must have skills in cooperation and teamwork.

We have to re-claim our democracy and recreate a healthy middle class

Since Reagan, the chasm between the top 1% and everyone else has been ever widening. My first experience of how it worked was back in 1986 and the Savings and Loan crisis. I was building a dozen houses a year back then and worked with a good group of subcontractors. Here's how it went: 1) There was a bailout. 2) Investors and banks got bailed out. 3) Subcontractors owed money got nothing.  

My 401K gets drained every 8-10 years as the playing field is tilted and bubbles are created and then burst. It's happened to most of the middle class.

There are better ways to educate our kids

For six years starting in 2005 I taught in Boston Public Schools at a district high school. It pretty much fit the profile of a "failing" urban school: a very large percentage of students who a) qualified for free lunch, b)would be the first in the family to attend college, c)did poorly on standardized tests, d)were ESL students e)were special needs students. What I discovered surprised me. These kids were as bright as the Boston Latin kids. So why did they do so terribly on tests? Why did they have such trouble reading and writing? How come they couldn't solve a problem they hadn't already seen?

The process of discovering the answers was intriguing and illuminating. The job held endless fascination and challenge.

They did terribly on tests because the people running the schools had this deep down sense that the tests were somehow unfair to urban minority kids but that we could raise the scores by a series of techniques or by using some product.

Students had trouble reading since to the people running the schools did not believe that reading was amazing and interesting or really important. The job of the teacher was defined as telling the students what the reading was about and what the themes were so then the class knew how to have discussions about how it connected to their lives.

Writing is problematic if you never read. Writing in an urban school system is of two types. One is the repeated honing of your personal narrative: how you came to the country, survived violent neighborhoods, overcame adversity, supported you families and would succeed as a doctor or a lawyer or a millionaire. The second type was the formulaic method on how to answer the open-response section of standardized tests: introduction, main-idea, evidence, analysis conclusion. Any other approach to teaching writing is frowned upon by the people who run the schools.

The people who run the schools are uncomfortable with student being asked to solve problems they haven't seen before. It is considered bad teaching to ask them.

Class discussions are cool, personal narratives are valuable. Aside from that there is not much going on in the Boston Public district (non-exam) high schools that is valuable for its students.

What is valued is compliance. If you do what we tell you to do we will give you good grades and declare you a successful student. The same goes for teachers. What is most valued is compliance. Talk the talk, follow the script and you are a team player, a success, a good teacher.

Students are confused. If they do everything you say and get good grades they declare themselves smart, moving from grade to grade elaborately concealing their inability to read, write or think clearly. Nobody rocks the boat.

For 2 years we didn't have any students who scored above 500 on the SAT's. The long running district high school SAT average for reading and math is 370. You get 370 if you get ~ 1 out of 4 correct.

The system is broken and the predominant cause lies in an administrative philosophy that shortchanges urban students. The headmaster's charade of being their friend masks the 'soft bigotry of low expectations' that the admin has for the students. You know the headmaster's kids would never be allowed to go to a school like theirs.

Students who are with compliant the administration's game-plan end up poorly educated nonetheless.

So you work around that. You build classroom environments where kids are comfortable admitting what they don't know. You teach them to read every day and find meaning and beauty in the words. You encourage them to collect material, imitate, practice daily at using words to explore ideas and develop their voice. You ask students questions whose choices illuminate for them what precise understanding actually entails. They get better at it. It is hard work but they can make up a lot of ground quickly.

You can do it with an incompetent or lazy administration. You can do it with an administration of benign neglect. It is more difficult with an activist administration on the prowl for mediocrity compliance. It becomes impossible when an administration decides to undermine your work with the kids.

Building stuff

I derive enormous satisfaction in building things. I turned drawings on paper into 3 dimensional spaces. As you gain experience your drawings become more creative because your ability to visualize improves. Your design can become more adventurous. Ted Howry built spiral staircases. A long time ago he showed me AutoCAD running on DOS. I used AutoCAD to create 3D models and then wrote Lisp code to create all the pieces and draw them and send them to a database. As long as I stayed +/- 1/4" as we framed, you could cut the all the roof parts before the second floor was even framed. It would work out. Computer code let you create things out of [slidingnote title="thin air." type="closeable"]

When you build second house you actually have to physically build it. Once you write a program to do something when you want to do it again you just press a button. Fascinating. You write a program to save you a half an hour of bookkeeping a day and end up freeing up almost 200 hours a year. You can spend that time body-surfing or fishing in Boston Harbor. [/slidingnote]

In the technology lab where I worked at BU as a PhD student we built models of vision and tried them out on images, mostly satellite images. We shared a code repository and kept project notes on a wiki. Later when started teaching I used wikis as my core technology. I worked in newly minted innovative school where every student had a [slidingnote title="laptop." type="closeable"] Mostly they looked at shoe ads and surfed BestBuy and chatted. I had to do something.[/slidingnote] I put my classes online, used a wiki, gave each student an account, left it wide open, everybody could see or even edit over everybody else. I wrote my lesson plans on the wiki and students wrote their papers there. They took notes and collected stuff in their wiki pages as well. What happened was transformative. Sixteen year old kids are actively forming their identity and working at creating and finding their own unique style. For these kids their writing became part of their style. Since their peers could see what they wrote, they started writing for their peers. You could say 'You gotta check out what Norbert wrote on Rousseau' and by the end of the day everybody had.

I became a hacker. Friday's a few of us would write code to extend what Mediawiki or Moodle could do. Recently I have tried to round out my [slidingnote title="skills," type="closeable"] to move from PHP creating pages to more of a model/view/controller framework, exploring HTML5, javascipt and JQuery and web application that can work on mobile devices. I'd like to continue to work with transformative technology, create new models of learning, take advantage of things like the Common Core Standards to empower students and teachers with new tools.

When you write you search for words to express your ideas but then the words you are playing with extend those ideas and you search for new words which beget new ideas .

todo

Need a cool splash and connect to more static content.