apple juice

a young woman stopped by before dinner with a clipboard. we have many clipboard people in our neighborhood. she was from Take Action MN.

I listened to her pitch, and as soon as I heard “ensure a public option”, I got out the checkbook. along with cable, internet, and cell phones, health care is the market we’ve most mangled with our capitalist system. (ask me why sometime…)

anyway, just found another good article in slate magazine, The Isolationism of Health Reform if you’re interested…

Every day Washington’s leaders tell us that we live in an interdependent world with a globalized economy. A butterfly beats its wings in Guangdong province and four Wal Marts materialize in Duluth. The peso plunges and 30 Honda workers get laid off in Marysville. A coal-fired power plant belches carbon dioxide in Prague and Lohachara Island sinks into the Bay of Bengal.

But change the subject to reform of the health care system, and the community of nations abruptly vanishes. No France, no Canada, no Germany, no Japan. Let there be no mention of any industrialized democracy save that of the United States, which is proud to claim 37th place in the World Health Organization’s rankings of the world’s health systems and 15th in the Commonwealth Fund’s ranking by avoidable mortality of 19 industrialized countries (the highest rank indicates the fewest such deaths). To achieve a better score would be unpatriotic!

I love how stubbornly we refuse to take the best ideas from around the world and use them in our country.

great article about the california high-speed rail project in the new york times magazine over the weekend: Getting Up to Speed

it’s going to require a political will that is practically unheard of… I can’t even imagine all of the backyards they’re going to have to criss-cross to make it work.

Apart from the breathtaking price tag, commentators often focus on the projected velocity of the California trains, on how they will reach an astounding 220 m.p.h. in some stretches near Bakersfield and will cover the distance from L.A. to the Bay Area at an average speed approaching 175 m.p.h. As someone who never understood the zealotry of hard-core train enthusiasts, I found the project’s other selling points more compelling: center city to center city in a few hours without airport lines or onerous security checks. No bus connections. No traffic. And no counting on luck. Which is to say that high-speed trains are obviously about going fast, but when you think about it, they’re just as much about time as speed.

I’m still hoping for the Minneapolis to Chicago connection. We just flew down there, to Midway airport, and it’s just so much more of a production than it needs to be.

It’s about 400 miles, doable in 2 hours and 15 minutes at an average of 175mph (as discussed in the article). I don’t know what the recommended lead time for boarding a train is, but let’s call it 30 minutes.

By plane, it takes 1 hour and 15 minutes. Add an hour for the check-in security lead time. And now add in additional travel time. Instead of arriving in downtown chicago, you’re arriving out at midway or o’hare. Add another 30 minutes.

We’re right at the same point. Except that a train can do this for 500 passengers, while each plane is only carrying ~150 passengers.

Well, anyways. Enough of that…

we had a great weekend in chicago!

We ate dinner over at Doug and Anne’s house the other night, and Doug pointed out that I had  not been keeping up with my photo-a-day project. I tried to retreat and explain that it was really a photo OF the day, which implied that it would not necessarily be every day.

I lost that argument.

artichoke

Yes yes yes!

It seems as though the newest wave of mothers is saying no to prenatal Beethoven appreciation classes, homework tutors in kindergarten, or moving to a town near their child’s college campus so the darling can more easily have home-cooked meals. (O.K., O.K., many were already saying no, but now they’re doing so without the feeling that a good parent would say yes.) Over coffee and out in cyberspace they are gleefully labeling themselves “bad mommies,” pouring out their doubts, their dissatisfaction and their dysfunction, celebrating their own shortcomings in contrast to their older sisters’ cloying perfection.

via Let the Kid Be – NYTimes.com.

Now we’re trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldnt solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

via The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online .

This article neatly ties up a lot of the thoughts I’ve been rolling around. The big question is, how do we apply this logic to education? What do your SAT scores matter if you can’t collaborate with others? I’d like to make the terms ‘project’, ‘paper’ and ‘test’ synonymous with ‘group’.

And, I think ‘digital socialism’ is a much nicer term than ‘dot-communism’.

This NYTimes article, Psst! Need the Answer to No. 7? Just Click Here. Hits on the same idea, from a different angle:

Course Hero offers three million student-submitted items from 400,000 courses at more than 3,500 institutions, including lecture notes, study guides, presentations, lab results, research papers, essays and homework assignments. Users who submit such items can navigate the site free of charge; others pay a monthly fee. Mr. Kim declined to say how many users had registered beyond “hundreds of thousands” and said they included more than 1,000 professors using the site to refresh their teaching materials.

The emphasis is mine, but these professors are the ones who are seeing value in the network, and using it to better their own work.

It will be a defining shift in the education system, when sharing and cooperation are the norm for students.

The nation’s first large-scale bike share program will be launched in Minneapolis next spring and could become a model for programs in other cities. If all goes well in raising $1.6 million in private matching funds for a $1.75 million federal grant, one thousand bikes will be available at 75 kiosks located primarily in the downtown, uptown and university areas.

via MinnPost – From Our Partners: Twin Cities Daily Planet: 1,000 bikes coming to Minneapolis?.

Great news! When we were in Paris a couple years ago, the bike sharing program there had recently begun, and it sounds like it has been very successful there.