Blog: February 2008

Richard Florida posts this great map and a few others showing international calls made from New York. This one breaks down individual zones of NYC by how many calls go to which countries. I'm not sure why some squares are filled and others aren't, though.

A college graduate read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, about how hard it is to get by on minimum wage jobs, and decided to try to disprove it. He went to Charleston with $25 and a gym bag and in a few months managed to get a job, move up, save money, and pull himself into a decent though frugal lifestyle.

What does it mean? Not much. The comments on the Consumerist thread and the ABC News report are more interesting than the story. Most people point to many reasons that he had a leg up over other people: he's college educated and didn't forget everything he had learned; he didn't have emotional problems stemming from an abusive parent; he didn't have a sick relative (at first; later an illness began in the family, and he had the luxury of leaving his experiment, which others wouldn't have been able to do).

Just look at the lede on the ABC story: "Alone on a dark gritty street, Adam Shepard searched for a homeless shelter. He had a gym bag, $25, and little else. A former college athlete with a bachelor's degree, Mr. Shepard had left a comfortable life with supportive parents in Raleigh, N.C." (emphasis added).

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When I worked at Google, family and friends would often ask if I'd seen a certain piece on Google on TV or in the newspaper or a magazine. I usually hadn't, because they were always the same: a picture of Larry, Sergey and Eric on some scooters with bouncy balls nearby, quotes from top people about how magical the place was. It's not that they were wrong, per se. Google had plenty of faults; it was, after all, a company, staffed by human beings, in which one did work, and people can be political and work is not always fun. But it was, indeed, a better place to work than most. It's just that the puffery didn't capture what the place really was about.

In response to the latest cookie-cutter puff piece, Kevin Scott (I worked with directly for about a year), wrote this on FriendFeed. Since I can't find any permalink-type things on FriendFeed, I'm quoting the whole thread:

Google is undoubtedly an awesome company and was certainly a great place to work the entire time I was there. But. These unreservedly positive fluff pieces really aren't doing the company a service. They irritated me when I was an employee given the too-perfect pictures they painted and what they missed. For instance, ideas at Google do not burst forth from the heads of geniuses and then find their way unimpeded to huge audiences of receptive users.

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I spent a few hours over the weekend updating the programs that generate the RSS and Atom feeds to handle Greater Greater Washington posts correctly. I had been using a script to generate them statically and then save the files to be accessed, but switched it over so that it would generate them when someone requested them. Unfortunately, the thing that generates the static versions did so and overwrote my new scripts, so I have to start over. Grr. Anyway, if you are one of the people who reads the blog in an RSS/Atom reader, fixed feeds will be coming soon. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Greater Greater Washington launched a few weeks ago, and I'm excited to see its readership growing. Please check it out and add it to your RSS reader (here's the feed, or you can subscribe for email updates).

As promised, Alpie.net is now only showing links to GGW posts instead of the entire posts. There will continue to be more posts on GGW than on Alpie.net for the foreseeable future, but I plan to keep posting photos, political opinions, economics thoughts, and other various non-city stuff here. I hope you will keep reading both blogs!

It may be pure fantasy, but with the unfortunate passing of Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos, a Democrat from mostly San Mateo County (northern Silicon Valley), some folks are suggesting the perfect next Congressman would be Professor Larry Lessig. There's a Draft Lessig Web site and a Facebook group that's up to 1,558 members. Nancy Scola has a good article on TechPresident about why this is not entirely (though almost) farfetched.

The open access movement argues that academic research, especially taxpayer-funded research, should be online and free for everyone to read. Today, many papers go into journals that charge high prices and jealously guard copyrights on this research (despite its being paid for by the public), keeping the information inaccessible to anyone without access to a well-funded university library. The movement is a close sibling to the rest of the copyright reform movement.

Led by Computer Science Professor Stuart Shieber (who happened to be my academic advisor in college, though that didn't mean much), Harvard's FAS is considering a proposal to publish all articles online, unless the author opts out of the system. This is a great step and it's great to see another example of Harvard leading in doing the right thing, opening the door for other universities to follow.

As you, the readers of Alpie.net, can clearly see, I've been blogging a great deal recently about urbanism issues, especially in the Washington, DC area. I've been considering for a month or two whether to launch a new blog, one focused on these issues and not my personal site, to fill a similar niche to what Streetsblog has done in New York. After much thought, I'm excited to announce that I have decided to do this.

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Every election, Californians have to deal with a bewildering array of propositions to vote on, many of which are arcane matters the state legislature ought to be dealing with. But they can't, because California law requires voters to approve every change in another law voters have approved, making it necessary to vote on propositions concerning expanding the authority of the BART police force to cover light rail trains and minutiae like that. Even when the propositions matter, there are so many of them as to make this parody, by Laughing Liberally comedian James Adomian, not far off: