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Can Spain be saved?

Spain is in a great depression, and it is one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen.

Five years after its housing boom turned to bust, Spanish unemployment hit a record high of 27.2 percent in the first quarter of 2013. It’s almost too horrible to comprehend, but 19.5 percent of the total workforce has not had a job in the past six months; 15.3 percent have not in the past year; and 9.2 percent have not in the past two years.

Here is why it is so bad

Spain is in a great depression, and it is one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen.

Five years after its housing boom turned to bust, Spanish unemployment hit a record high of 27.2 percent in the first quarter of 2013. It’s almost too horrible to comprehend, but 19.5 percent of the total workforce has not had a job in the past six months; 15.3 percent have not in the past year; and 9.2 percent have not in the past two years.

In other words, unemployment is a trap people fall into, but can’t fall out of. Indeed, the rate of new unemployment has stabilized at a terrible, but not quite-as-terrible, level, as you can see with the flat blue, red, and green lines. But the steadily rising purple line shows us that the rate of job-finding for the jobless has collapsed.

That is what a permanent underclass looks like.

What happened?

Why has Spain’s jobs depression been so great? After all, its GDP is “only” 4.1 percent below its 2007 level, compared to 5.8 percent below for Portugal, 7 percent below for Italy, and 20 percent below for Greece. But despite this better (negative) growth, unemployment is higher in Spain than the others. In other words, Spanish unemployment isn’t just about inadequate demand. Part of it is structural.

Spain’s labor market problems fall into two big buckets: too much regulation, and not enough education. It’s almost impossible for companies to get rid of older workers, which creates a horribly bifurcated labor market. There are permanent workers who can’t be fired, and temporary ones who can — and are. Indeed, as Clive Crook points out, about a third of Spain’s workforce are temporary workers who enjoy few protections and fewer opportunities. Companies go through these younger workers without bothering to invest much in their human capital, because why would they? These temporary workers will be let go at the first sign of economic trouble. Young people get stuck in a never-ending cycle of under-and-unemployment since firms are always hesitant to hire permanent workers who will always be on their books.

But it gets worse. The housing bust hasn’t just cast a shadow over household and bank balance sheets; it’s cast one over young people’s educations too. At its peak, building made up a whopping 19 percent of Spain’s economy, which, as Tobias Buck of the Financial Times points out, lured many young men into dropping out of school for well-paying construction gigs. But now that building has gone into hibernation, all of those young men are left with no work and no education to fall back on. And, again, even if they can find temporary jobs, it’s not as if the companies will spend money to develop their skills.

An urban school district that works

Apr 7th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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To listen to some school reformers, you’d think there are no urban traditional public schools that are successful. Here’s a different story.

Nowhere at George Washington Elementary School are the virtues of collegiality and collaboration more visible than in the third grade. The Dream Team—that’s how other teachers at the school refer to Alina Bossbaly, Marilyn Corral, Jen Schuck, Mary Ann Hart and Irene Stamatopolous. Although their personalities differ greatly, they mesh as smoothly as a 400-yard relay team, and this bond helps to explain why, year after year, their students have been the school’s top performers on the New Jersey ASK, the state’s high-stakes exam. On the May 2010 exam, 79% passed the reading and writing test and an off-the-charts 93% were rated proficient in math—the best results in the entire district.

Not one of these teachers would have been accepted by Teach for America. They all grew up within a half hour’s drive from Union City and never moved away. (Two of them thought about teaching in a ghetto school in New York City, but their friends talked them out of it, and only one has ever taught elsewhere.) Only a higher education expert or someone who hails from northern New Jersey would have heard of the commuter schools—William Paterson, Jersey City, Stockton State, and the like—that they attended. Their GPAs weren’t necessarily stellar, and while some are more naturally gifted teachers than others, they all had a hard time at the start of their teaching careers.

The best explanation for their effectiveness is what they have learned—and keep learning—from their colleagues. These teachers improve, the passable ones becoming solid practitioners and the good ones maturing into candidates for a demonstration video, in good measure because of the informal tutelage that the old hands give the newbies, the day-to-day collaboration, the modeling of good practice, and the swapping of ideas about what’s worth trying in their classrooms. “The most productive thinking,” as the research confirms, “is continuous and simultaneous with action—that is, with teaching—as practitioners collaboratively implement, assess, and adjust instruction as it happens.”

The culture of abrazos, of love and caring, that permeates Washington School is rooted in close relationships of long standing between Principal Les Hanna and the teachers, among the teachers, and between the school and the families. Their ties to the kids come naturally because they have an intimate understanding of their students’ lives. Many of them grew up and still live close by, so when they talk about the students as “our kids,” as they often do, they mean it almost literally.

“Our kids’ lives are truly, truly horrible,” Les tells me. “We have to be there now.” That’s no exaggeration. What’s astonishing is how many of these children thrive despite the jagged edges of their lives. For some of them, just making it to school represents a real accomplishment.

No Standardized Tests Left Behind

Apr 6th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

1 comment

My mom was a teacher, I am related to a teacher. I have teachers who are friends. I respect people who choose to teach. It’s not an easy job. Of course not all of them are good. My grade one teacher was an alcoholic which meant that each Monday morning (and several other mornings) the lights were turned off and the film strip was shown at a low level. In grade 2 my teacher was a racist who introduced us to the offensive term, “spic“. She was also emotionally abusive. After that things got better and there was a lot of good teachers that taught me. Some were also alcoholics and drug addicts but in the classroom, they taught me a lot. (Twelve years, two alcoholics, one racist, and one drug addict doesn’t seem that good in hindsight…)

Of all of the education topics that gets teachers riled up is the topic of standardized tests. There is a reason for that. Standardized testing has been used to fire teachers and in the case of Chicago, entire schools, including the janitors if test scores are too low. Of course that doesn’t make any difference. I visited a Chicago school that had “rebooted” it’s school twice and was on the third bunch of teachers and staff and the test scores were still awful and horrible.

I heard Senator Vern White speak of recruiting indigenous police officers. He looked at one exam given to RCMP recruits from northern communities. It had questions about traffic lights but none of those communities had traffic lights. Of course they did poorly. A more contextual test gave more accurate results.

There are just too many factors beyond the teachers control. I have written about housing instability. There are issues of instability in the family, disinterested parents, economic issues, drugs, and you have one year’s teacher being held accountable for what was being taught before them.

I do think there is a place for standardized tests in our education system. They aren’t a tool for evaluating teachers but rather to identify problems before they get out of hand and see if our solutions are working.

Let’s say we test students yearly and we start to see some trends starting that we know cause problems later on. We know students in economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods struggle more than others for many reasons. Poor standardized tests would trigger resources designed to tackle the problem. Those solutions could be a lot of things. More computers in the classroom, an educational assistant, a breakfast or lunch program, or maybe a new educational method in an earlier grade. Continued standardized testing becomes the tool to evaluate the changes to see if they are effective on a school by school basis.

Of course it was be a big deal to implement and take a lot of money but right now our standardized tests are kind of useless. They don’t give individual feedback (so the data is useless to parents who want to see how their child is doing) and are not contexualized. The advantage of doing this is a much better and bigger data set to tackle educational problems on a macro and micro level, information that most educators don’t have right now. On a smaller level, it’s also information that parents need about their own children.

The bad part of this is that isn’t how standardized tests are used and I doubt anyone will ever do this but they do have potential, if we could only use it.

Learning to love big oil

Mar 19th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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Don’t criticize me for posting this, I am from Alberta after all.

The drivers of the trucks are here for the same reason I am: the boom in drilling for oil and natural gas. The vast, dry lands south of Vernal hold about half of the state’s active rigs and present a veritable smorgasbord of opportunities for energy extraction: shale aplenty, fracking for both oil and natural gas, and even the state’s very own poised-to-open tar sands. Uintah County has been Utah’s main oil producer for more than 70 years. As far back as 1918, National Geographic extolled the area’s potential: “Campers and hunters in building fires against pieces of the rock had been surprised to find that they ignited, that they contain oil.” In other words, what is happening here is no nouveau drilling dalliance, no young sweetheart in first flush, freshly wooed, like the Bakken Field in North Dakota, but an on-again, off-again affair that has been going on for decades.

It is that affair that interests me, with all the salacious details of how Big Oil sidles up to a town, flirts with it, and wins it over. Not to mention what happens if — or, more accurately, when — the wooer decides to ditch the wooed.

In Vernal, population 9,000, evidence of earlier wooing abounds. A quick ride around town reveals Big Oil’s equivalent of a dozen roses or a box of candy. There are shiny new schools and municipal buildings and ballparks. The Western Park Convention Center, covering 32 acres, is one of the largest buildings of its kind in the West. Not every town hosts a golf tournament called Petroleum Days or throws a music festival — like last summer’s weekend-long Country Explosion — co-sponsored by a maker of centrifuges and mud/gas separators. Then there’s the Uintah Basin Applied Technology College, a beautiful sandstone building with the streamlined look of a brand-new upscale airport.

On my first visit to Vernal, in the heat of July, I peeked in on a class called Well Control, where a movie was being shown that, unlike the grainy safety films of my youth, had the production values of a Spielberg movie. There were models of oil derricks in the lobby, with the name Anadarko, the giant Texas oil company that is one of the area’s main employers, prominently displayed. In this case, Anadarko’s particular bouquet was a $1.5 million gift for construction and faculty endowment.

It was a short drive over to the rec center, a looming spectacle of oaken beams and concrete and great sheets of glass that revealed within Olympic-size pools and running tracks and climbing walls and squash courts. It looked as if Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Shorter had gotten together to build their dream house. This building points to one of the less obvious ways the town has been wooed. While Anadarko alone paid $14 million in county property taxes last year, the total income for Vernal and Uintah County from oil and gas far exceeds this number, as a result of sales tax, production taxes, mining royalties, and lease payments on federal land. In other words, the building is not a gift outright but the metaphoric equivalent of Big Oil saying, “Here, honey, go buy yourself something nice.”

It starts out well

“When I first came here in the seventies, it was a beautiful place,” Herm said. “A lazy Main Street lined with cottonwoods. The old booms had faded, and the two top businesses in town were agriculture and tourism. People came to see the dinosaur quarry at the park. People came to float on the river.”

He held out his large hands, palms up. “And what are we left with now?”

Certainly not tourism. A tourist would be hard pressed to find a hotel room in Vernal. In fact, while oil jobs and the services that support them have been rising, the numbers of people employed in agriculture and recreation have fallen dramatically.

And then there were the busts. Herm remembers the last one. Storage lockers of people’s possessions being auctioned off. Houses foreclosed. He is not against drilling, he told me, but what is lacking is perspective and long-term thinking. The problem is exemplified by the archetypal Vernal high school student who drops out, lured by the chance to make money working in the oil fields, and buys a house, a big truck, some ATVs.

“What happens if that job goes away?” Herm asked. “He is left with no education, many debts.” In fact, at the public meeting where Herm questioned the oil orthodoxy, a boy just like that stood up and said, “If we don’t keep drilling, how will I pay for everything?”

Herm wasn’t trying to drive oil out of town. He was merely suggesting that Vernal proceed with some restraint and consider investing in the future. For that he was greeted with fury, even death threats.

Over the past 40 years Herm had seen Big Oil bring its gifts, and its gifts were shiny. But he had also seen oil and chemicals foaming and floating down the Green River. He had seen rising crime, prostitution, spousal abuse, and a culture defined by the twentysomething males who come to work the oil fields. (Utah has a higher incidence of rape than the national average, and Vernal has a much higher rate than the state as a whole.) Air quality has dramatically worsened; last winter’s ozone levels in the county rivaled those of Los Angeles.

All this has made Herm a little less giddy than most about Vernal’s prospects.

“I’ve been through it before,” he said. “They come into your neighborhood. They change your neighborhood. Then they move away. And we’re left to pick up the pieces and pay the bills.”

The party does always end but it’s going to be going on for a while, even in towns like Vernal. Yet even in Alberta, the party may not end, it may be occasionally interrupted.

Out of the Cold

Jan 24th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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As an idealist, I would like to believe that the social safety net in this province worked a lot a better than it does and on nights like tonight, no one would be left outside where they could possibly freeze. Most nights the system works but there are some nights people that are outside and as we have seen, some freeze to death.

The reason they are outside is that:

They don’t qualify for Social Services emergency funding because

The are receiving what is called Transitional Employment Assistance and don’t qualify for emergency assistance (which makes no sense to me)
Their worker decided that when it is 30 below, it is a good time to decide to make teach them personal responsibility.

Other emergency services won’t fund them
They have a fear of using social agencies.
They are banned from all facilities.

In full disclosure I have banned people before and will do it again. The reason we ban people because they are too dangerous to other people (arsonist, violent, drug dealer) or are a danger to staff (predatorily sex offender, violence against staff in the past), or are a dangerous to themselves (they do something where like 20 people want to beat them up… it happens). We have to balance the safety of the facility, clients, and staff vs. the needs of the individual. While its easy to say that we need to give people another and another chance, when I have done it in the past, people have gotten seriously hurt.

The end result is that they have nowhere to go or no one wants to help them.

What we have done this year is open an Out of the Cold shelter at The Lighthouse. Technically it isn’t it’s own shelter but a series of protocols that staff follow to make sure that people are housed. It is a low threshold shelter where the primary importance is to make sure people are warm and safe no matter what the mood is of the system.

It sounds nice but it really isn’t. Like anything that is a result of a failure of the system, it enables the system to behave badly. In other cities it allows social worker to not help because there is another safety net that is there and it doesn’t reflect on anyone’s caseload. It also moves a role that the government is supposed to take a roll in and moves to CBOs which isn’t cool. If it was a perfect world, it wouldn’t be needed but it isn’t and so we do it.

Of course when we take them in, it becomes our problem. Some people have fallen through the cracks and just need a break. Those are a pleasure to deal with. Others are entitled who believe that the system (which is now The Lighthouse) has to take care of them. They are not so much fun.

As for the people who need it, it’s been good for them and for the most part good for the staff. The staff have quite a bit of latitude to book someone in and like we say, “it’s easier to explain to [me] why you did it than explain your actions about why you did not to a coroner”. In two cases where we have used it, within a day or two the men had found employment and housing really quick. In other cases there are some mental health or addiction issues that made it harder but that’s part of it as well. The only negative encounter was that someone started to yell and scream at the staff around 5:30 a.m. but they had stayed the night, were safe, warm, but just a little cranky. We’ll take that as a win.

As for those that are banned. Those are the calls that wake Chris Powell and I up in the night (hopefully Chris more than me). We have worked with staff to give them more latitude but to overturn a ban, they are to call us and we make the final decision. It’s a hard decision to make. It’s hard to get banned from The Lighthouse and it means that they are dangerous to others. We are working on some protocols that will make that happen more but I’ll be honest, it’s the hardest thing to deal with and like I said, when I have overturned bans in the past, people have gotten hurt. What we are doing is re-assessing things and relying on some good community partners assessments. If that is a go, we will house them. Sadly not all community partners can assess someone. Police officers are good for a lot of things, assessing the behaviour of someone in a shelter is not one of those skills but we also have staff there and most times the cops are quite good about it. Emergency room staff on the other hand are a lost cause. They can’t be counted on to give an honest assessment.

The last category is there are some that are afraid of using social services and that is a post all by itself. Basically something happened in their past that they associate with social services and for whatever reason, they won’t go back, even though they need help. Staff house them and we help them in the morning.

The other weird thing has been that people are coming in because they hear that they can get a shower and cleaned up. They all tell the frontline staff that it is myself that told them that they can come in (which is weird as I never have). It’s not part of the program but the front desk staff has been accommodating those requests as well. It’s a hassle with the way our facility is designed but allows people to come out of the cold, warm up, get clean and hopefully feel better about themselves. We don’t mind offering that service as well and if nothing else, we are making Saskatoon a better smelling place to live in. That has to be worth something.

The goal is that when we are done our renovations is that we will offer a full urban rest stop type of service. Cold/hot drinks, washer/dryer, showers, and computers. We have all the pieces but we will work hard over the next couple of months to integrate them together a little better. It’s a process but I think we are getting somewhere.

Why not Caroline Robins School?

Jan 15th, 2013

by Jordon Cooper.

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Excellent article by The StarPhoenix’s Janet French

Why do so many parents spurn Caroline Robins for the stuffed halls of Dundonald?

One Hampton Village resident said some of her neighbours can’t get over the outdated “community school” label.

Justine McCaffrey, the president of the Hampton Village community association, has two sons, four and two years old. Although they had strongly considered Caroline Robins, her older child attends Dundonald preschool because it’s closer to their house and a teenage neighbour can walk him to and from school.

“Had we lived any further away from the schools, I would be taking my kids to Caroline Robins.”

She’s heard parents say they won’t consider sending their kids to Caroline Robins because it was a “community school.” That used to be a designation that gave schools extra provincial funding for nutrition programs and other extras to help lower-income students.

A third of Caroline Robins’ students are First Nations and Metis.

It’s up to the school division to dispel stereotypes about Caroline Robins and tell parents what the school has to offer, she said.

“People sit there and they look at the label ‘community school,’ and they think (Caroline Robins is an) inner-city school, where there’s less fortunate kids, that the teachers aren’t the same — which they are,” McCaffrey said. “It’s no different of a school than Dundonald is, or St. Peter, or any of the schools in the area.”

The answer is that Caroline Robins school is a community school because the public school system has decided that the kids that go there need additional supports. Sadly they need the supports (like feeding programs and other supports) because they are not all getting them at home. Often it means disengaged parents which lead to lower classroom performance. So as a parent in Hampton Village, do you want to send your kid to an overcrowded school with more engaged parents and students or a community school with less engaged parents and lower performing students? The numbers answer that question.

Rethinking Le Plateau-Mont-Royal (and how to do municipal politics)

Jul 1st, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

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A good article on Luc Fernandez, Montreal city councillor and mayor of Le Plateau-Mont-Royal

Luc Ferrandez’s last bicycle was a Kona, a sturdy model with thick tires, ideal for hauling heavy loads. During his 2009 campaign as the Projet Montréal candidate for the Plateau-Mont-Royal borough, he would hook it to a trailer piled with a laptop, a projector, a collapsible screen, and (this being Montreal) a couple of bottles of rosé. After setting up his equipment next to a café terrace, he would distribute paper cups and launch a PowerPoint slide show of streets and squares in Copenhagen, Paris, and Madrid, as well as historical photos of local boulevards, all unencumbered by traffic. He figures it was these partys de trottoir, or sidewalk parties—during which he made the case that Montreal could be as clean, green, and safe as any place in Europe—that won him the mayoralty of the city’s most populous district. His mountain bike, alas, didn’t survive the campaign.

“I was having a discussion with a citizen,” recalls Ferrandez. “I left my bike against a wall, unlocked. When I came back an hour later, it was gone.” These days, his main mode of transportation is an Opus, which has the upright handlebars and broad saddle of a bike you would expect to find leaning against a canal-side railing in Amsterdam.

I like his philosophy

“I accept that some people think I’m the devil!” Ferrandez shouted over his shoulder, making a right onto rue de Brébeuf. “For them, the Plateau doesn’t exist. It is just a place to be driven through. I don’t give a shit about these people. They’ve abandoned the idea that humans can live together.”

Ferrandez’s vision of what the borough is, and could be, seems almost exalted. “The Plateau is an Italian cathedral. It’s a forest. It’s something to protect, something sacred. I don’t want it to become a place where people come to live in a condo with triple-glazed windows for a couple of years. This has to be a place where people can be comfortable walking to the bakery, walking to school, walking to the park—where they want to stay to raise a family.”

For Sale: 1 Fixie

Jun 26th, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

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From a failed hipster. Here is the text from the add on Craigslist.

I tried so hard. I dated a girl from Portland. I criticized cheese. I applied the term artisanal to every inanimate object that went in or on my body. I burned and singed my forearms just to make it look like I was going to culinary school. I grew Carol Brady hair. I got itchy from the finest flannel and I cut off circulation from the waist down with jeans that made my ass look like an elevator button.

. . .And I rode a fixie.

No more. It’s all gotta go. The hair, the macrame, the texting overages, the Netflix and Hulu Plus. The record collection (have you ever tried to box up and move an effin stack of LPs?!) . . .and the bike. Pictured below is the bike. It’s beautiful. It’s got red rims. Red chain. Red tires. Red handlebars shaped like devil horns — because it’s the devil.

The guys at the hipster store don’t tell you fixes don’t stop. So I will. Fixies don’t stop. Stop sign? Fixie don’t care. Car coming turning in front of you at a three-way stop? Fixie laugh. Want Chipotle? Nope. Fixie want protein powder/beet/purple carrot/bee pollen juice and won’t stop till he gets it. Fixie has a mind of his own.

Yesterday, Fixie got pulled over twice by SLO PD in three hours. In six months time, Fixie collected more tickets than a scalper for a Radiohead show at Hollywood Bowl.

I’m selling this badboy and tipping the dregs of my last PBR tall boy in his memory.

The (Devil) Fixie:
Cinelli Gazzetta Frame (2011)
Crane Creek and Origin 8 components
$1,100 ($1,600 new)

Nice.

Texas honor student jailed for truancy

May 29th, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

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Diane Tran, an honor student in Texas, was thrown in jail by a Judge Moriarty after she missed too many classes at her high school.

Tran said she works both full-time and part-time jobs, in addition to taking advanced and college level courses. But the judge said Tran’s case was bigger than the individual situation of one student. "If you let one run loose, what are you gonna’ do with the rest of ‘em?,"said Judge Lanny Moriarty. "Let them go too? A little stay in the jail for one night is not a death sentence."

But Tran’s classmates said she had a lot more to juggle than the average teen. "She goes from job to job from school. She stays up until 7 a.m. in the morning doing her homework," said Devin Hill, a classmate and co-worker.

On top of that, Tran said her parents spilt up and moved away, leaving her to support her younger sister. The judge admitted that he wanted to make an example of the teen. Tran had to spend 24 hours in jail and had to pay a $100 fine.

Nice to see that there is no more common sense in Texas.

The Research Education Framework

Apr 9th, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

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AKMA has a great post from his vantage point from the University of Glasgow on the hated Research Education Framework

In order to understand the *#$€!¥!#* REF, you should bear in mind that universities over here have for the past century or so been funded almost exclusively by the government. That’s a system that has cultivated one of the outstanding educational systems in the world, second (perhaps, though it depends on the sample one takes) or superior to the USA. Since the economic collapse (for which the universities and other public services must have been primarily responsible, since it’s our funding being cut and not financiers having to repay the losses their speculation caused), funding for teaching (as distinct from research) is being cut to the bone; for humanities disciplines, our main government contribution will come for research. And the way the government’s research funding is determined is the *#$€!¥!#* REF.

(Research funding was determined by the *#$€!¥!#* REF’s predecessor, the RAE, in the past; since other sources of funding are drying up, though, the research component takes on heightened importance.)

The *#$€!¥!#* REF works this way: at a given moment, every university in the UK will gather pieces of research that represent the work of their staff in various subject areas, and a committee of scholars will evaluate all the books, essays, research reports, whatever, and assign each institution’s staff a piece of the research pie. That moment, for this REF cycle, begins January 2014. All across the UK, academics are straining to make sure that they have four significant publications in print before that deadline — all at once, except for the elect who have already published four estimable works.

What a messed up way of determining funding.

I no longer care what you think.

Apr 1st, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

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Derek Powazek wrote this last year

Life on the net can be hard. It’s human nature to want to be liked, and to feel bad when someone says something negative to you. And if it’s one thing we all know about the internet, it’s that at any moment, someone, somewhere, is saying something negative.

An easy solution would be to withdraw, to not participate at all. But the world is getting more digital, not less. Eventually we won’t have a choice: if we want any kind of social life, we’ll have to participate in the social web.

Another solution would be to develop a thicker skin. And while I’ve certainly done that over the years, I never want to become so callous that I just don’t care about anything. I want to be able to be myself in the world.

So the solution I’ve come to is this: I care a lot about a very small group of people. I maintain a hierarchy of who I need to be okay with. It starts with my wife Heather, my parents and my sister, and includes my clients and a very short list of friends. You know who’s not on that list? Anonymous internet commenters. For them and everyone else not on the list, I just try to remember a saying I heard once: “Your opinion of me is none of my business.”

If you’re reading this, chances are, you’re not on that list, and I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings. But the truth is, I’m probably not on your list, either. It’s okay if our hearts are not yet big enough to include everyone they deserve.

He manages it this way

If you use Twitter, you pay attention to your mentions – the tweets that include @yourusername – because that’s how you have conversations. And therein lies the problem, because anyone can tweet at you that way. Some of those people are batshit crazy like the Haight Street Guy, while others are just merely rude like the Conference Talker Guy.

The difference is, on Haight Street, you have to walk briskly away and hope you’re not followed. And at the conference, you have to de-escalate the conversation politely, in front of a crowd. But on Twitter, there is a magic button, and in one click, poof, the crazy is gone.

It’s a wonderful thing. A thing so lovely I often find myself wishing it existed in real life.So why is blocking such a taboo?

I think the Block function on sites like Twitter and Flickr is unfortunately named. There’s something about the word – Block! – that comes across as a personal insult. And that’s too bad, because it’s basically the only tool we have to effectively manage our social experience in those communities.

I propose that blocking people on sites like Twitter or Flickr should not be interpreted as an insult. I propose that it’s simply taking yourself out of someone else’s attention stream.

If I block you on Twitter, my tweets no longer show up in your timeline. If I block you on Flickr, my photos no longer show up on your contacts page. In these settings, this is the only way for me to remove myself from your attention.

I don’t know what Derek defines as his breaking point. Over the years I have left a couple of comments on both his and Heather’s Flickr and Twitter streams that have been sometimes ignored and sometimes replied to but I haven’t been blocked. I tend to do the same thing although I fall more on the ignore side of the things which doesn’t mean I don’t care but it often means I have nothing to say back. It’s how Twitter works. I hadn’t thought of it that much until someone that I know unknowingly posted something fairly offensive on my Twitter stream and I was going to reply when I realized that I didn’t care what this person thought of my views so I hit “block”. I used to do it quite a bit on my blog but a combination of blocking those that just want to argue and not posting very much eliminated the need.

I get a lot of criticism and feedback at work. I work with the hard to house and many have significant anger issues along with a variety of social disorders. When they don’t get their way, they generally comment on my weight, my intelligence, my faith, being bald, and being ugly. It happens day in and day out but at the end of the day I can go home and relax. To log in and get it day in and day out when all I want to do is a little reading and writing is absurd. By blocking you, I remove my offensive views from your attention and we are both happier. My piece of the internet is free from inane comments, your net is free of my views that bother you so much. There is such a thing as win/win and it’s found by clicking block.

Powazek talks of the need to stay reconciled with some people but I find that those people don’t take stupid potshots online. The other thing is that there is a difference between being close to someone and having to interact with them online. Facebook and myself don’t get along that well. It doesn’t mean that I don’t like people who choose to interact there, it just means that I choose not to interact with them there. Same with online. On Twitter I choose who I follow but I can also choose who I want to follow me and I am realizing more and more, I don’t want all people interacting with me there. I realize that some people that are normal in person are jerks online. If you don’t like it, I think I just said, I don’t really care.

Short term mobile phone storage for students

Feb 20th, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

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This is kind of crazy.

Mobile phones are banned in NYC public schools so a company called Pure Loyalty parks trucks outside of several schools so that students can check their phones, iPods, and other devices for the duration of the school day.

What Americans want: A walkable neighborhood

Feb 10th, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

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From Good

The symbol of American success often involves having the biggest house possible, but our outsized fantasies seem to be shifting. According to a new survey, more than three quarters of us consider having sidewalks and places to take a walk one of our top priorities when deciding where to live. Six in 10 people also said they would sacrifice a bigger house to live in a neighborhood that featured a mix of houses, stores, and businesses within an easy walk.

For once, our preferences align with our impending reality; in the future, we may not have a choice whether or not to downsize our lifestyles. The housing bust exposed that the McMansion phenomenon is unsustainable, which has forced us to re-examine our priorities. In another study in 2010, the ideal number of square footage people desired for their houses dropped dramatically. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the American dream of buying a big old house will need to be revised for the youngest generation.

I wonder if it is an awakening towards urban design or the reality that the traditional American dream is dead and things like a walkable neighborhood and a real sense of community is a pretty important too.

How Harvard University Spends Your Tuition

Feb 8th, 2012

by Jordon Cooper.

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I wonder how this compares to the University of Saskatchewan.

We love our smartphones

Oct 3rd, 2011

by Jordon Cooper.

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I may not be addicted to my Blackberry so much as I just really love it.

Friends who have accidentally left home without their iPhones tell me they feel stressed-out, cut off and somehow un-whole. That sounds a lot like separation anxiety to me. Not long ago, I headed an effort to identify the 10 most powerful, affecting sounds in the world: I found that a vibrating phone came in third, behind only the Intel chime and the sound of a baby giggling. Phantom vibration syndrome is the term I use to describe our habit of scrambling for a cellphone we feel rippling in our pocket, only to find out we are mistaken. Similar to pressing an elevator button repeatedly in the belief that the elevator will descend sooner, we check our phones for e-mails and texts countless times a day, almost as if we can will others to text, call, e-mail or Skype us.

So are our smartphones addictive, medically speaking? Some psychologists suggest that using our iPhones and BlackBerrys may tap into the same associative learning pathways in the brain that make other compulsive behaviors — like gambling — so addictive. As with addiction to drugs or cigarettes or food, the chemical driver of this process is the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine.

Earlier this year, I carried out an fMRI experiment to find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games. In conjunction with the San Diego-based firm MindSign Neuromarketing, I enlisted eight men and eight women between the ages of 18 and 25. Our 16 subjects were exposed separately to audio and to video of a ringing and vibrating iPhone.

In each instance, the results showed activation in both the audio and visual cortices of the subjects’ brains. In other words, when they were exposed to the video, our subjects’ brains didn’t just see the vibrating iPhone, they “heard” it, too; and when they were exposed to the audio, they also “saw” it. This powerful cross-sensory phenomenon is known as synesthesia.

But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.

In short, the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.

It’s really not that much of a mystery of why we love our phones. In an age of being increasingly disconnected because of working hours, distance, or other reasons, our phones bring all of our connections back into focus. We don’t love our phones, we love how they bring people back into our lives.