Duane Gran’s log of thoughts

An excellent article in The Guardian puts in stark relief the subculture most overlooked in America:

A shocking 37 million Americans live in poverty. That is 12.7 per cent of the population - the highest percentage in the developed world. They are found from the hills of Kentucky to Detroit’s streets, from the Deep South of Louisiana to the heartland of Oklahoma. Each year since 2001 their number has grown.

I wish I had a solution so compelling by sheer fact that we would rally together to solve this problem, but as the article points out, the problem is systemic — the American zeal for individualism declares victory for the strong and failure for the weak.

In related news, it is with sadness that John Galbraith has passed away. His legacy will remembered, and if possible, rekindled.

He remained optimistic about the ability of government to improve the lot of the less fortunate. “Let there be a coalition of the concerned,” he urged. “The affluent would still be affluent, the comfortable still comfortable, but the poor would be part of the political system.”

Waldo asked me to host this week’s roundup of interesting local writing in what has become known as the C’ville Blog Carnival. For the uninitiated, a blog carnival is sort of traveling showcase but without the requisite carnies. Next week’s collection will be compiled and hosted by Jim Duncan.

Speaking of Jim, he wrote this week about the various policies surrounding connected communities in central Virginia and Trish writes about the propensity of developers to burn organic refuge when clearing space.

In political news, the big fuss around town is the May 2 elections, with voter guides from Charlottesville Tomorrow and The Daily Progress (by way of cvillenews). Additionally, Brian Wheeler’s Charlottesville Tomorrow has a podcast of 4th City Council Candidate Forum. If local politics aren’t your thing, The Hook notes that Cindy Sheehan will be coming to town, but I expect that it won’t please our more conservative bloggers like Whitney Blake, who has been recognized for sowing “chaos, dissent, and apathy.”

Social justice made big news with the Living Wage campaign at UVa, but David Swanson puts it into larger perspective. C’ville News covered the unveiling of the free speech monument while also stimulating a pretty good discussion on the site. Who needs chalk? We have weblogs.

Too much time on your hands? Sean Tubbs would like a volunteer to help with our local podcasting network and Jennifer suspects that The Paramount will need volunteers next year.

Local cartoonist (comic-maker?) Jen Sorensen has taken up the issue of food safety laws in her latest strip.

In school news, School Matters discusses the value of teenagers serving on school boards and Dean Jeannine talks about the implications of a myspace.com account in the admissions process.

Finally, if you enjoyed not paying extra for the bandwidth used in this posting (which is made with 100% recycled zeros and ones) you may wish to follow the advice of Bleeding Edge Tech and try to save the internet.

That’s all folks. I’m just one fellow surveying the local scene, but if something notable was left out please leave a comment with a link for others. If my cheeky way of writing upset anyone, no offense was intended.

A report (pdf file) from Public Citizen details “how 18 families worth a total of $185.5 billion have financed and coordinated a 10-year effort to repeal the estate tax, a move that would collectively net them a windfall of $71.6 billion.” I’m not disposed to elaborate explanations or conspiracy, but the group has done an effective job of unmasking the layers of anonymity which a handful of wealthy people have used to fund a campaign to discredit the estate tax, leading to its temporary repeal.

The legislation is up for renewal in 2011, but we can hope that the congress disregards the anti-estate tax lobby’s rhetoric. See my previous notes about the history behind the re-branding of the estate tax for some context on the issue.

Update (9 June 2006): The LA Times reports that Republicans don’t have the votes necessary to make the repeal permanent. This is a victory for the 98% who would not have benefited from the repeal.

Jaun Cole has launched The Global Americana Institute, an ambitious project to coordinate the translation and dissemination of classic American thought, such as the writings of Paine, Jefferson and Franklin. Cole’s announcement of the initiative reveals that America’s founding principles aren’t communicated in Middle Eastern languages. Occasionally they are studied at Universities in English, but the knowledge of American ideals remain a sort of dark net. Naturally, misinformation and mythology consume the darkness.

Cole goes further to challenge municipalities and historical societies to join the effort. In particular, he speaks to my community:

What about Virginia and especially Charlottesville? Don’t they want Thomas Jefferson available in Arabic? Can anyone there help with putting us in touch with funders?

I don’t have a definitive answer, but if someone connected with Monticello is reading, maybe we can put our heads together on this (my contact info). I’m sure we can forge a public-private partnership to raise funds for the translation.

A Telegraph article reports that the US State Department and Business for Diplomatic Action have partnered together to remedy brash behavior which contributes to negative impressions of Americans abroad. Together they “plan an image make-over by issuing guides for Americans travelling overseas on how to behave.”

Bravo. This marks a change in strategy from past media blitzes and promotional campaigns from on high. The new strategy encourages anyone who travels to become a citizen ambassador. Not only does the new initiative distribute the task, it directs effort where it will produce the most good — personal interaction between Americans and foreigners. The sixteen simple rules of etiquette may well be a boon if the travelers exercise the advice at home as well. The program, for little cost and effort, will at worst simply make us more polite.

In addition to the pamphlet campaign, the industry group will sponsor fellowships in partnership with the Young Arab Leaders. This reminds me of the Rotary Fellowship program, which has been successful in promoting cultural understanding and peace between peoples.

As tax day approaches, I would like to share a suggestion for our politicians who crafted this byzantine system whereby we tally our civic dues.

I propose that all members of congress should be required to prepare their own returns and certify, under penalty of perjury, that the documentation is accurate. If it’s good enough for SEC filings for our corporate executives, it should be fitting for our politicians.

The Center for Media and Democracy has released a chilling report about the pervasive and irresponsible usage of video news releases (VNRs) by televisions stations. The video clips are often produced by corporations or the government, as noted previously here. The CMD monitored the use of prepackaged video by television affiliates and found that stations gladly included them in their broadcasts, disguise the VNRs as their own content and don’t verify VNR claims.

The lure of moving images and polished production appears to meet the already low threshold of newsworthiness. The causes are manifold, from constrained budgets to laziness — not the least being that of the viewing public. If we are to live up to our calling as rational beings we will require a new kind of civic awareness and digital literacy to tease apart content from advertisement.

An I, Cringely essay offers a sad glimpse into how Microsoft has ceded ground on computer security.

Last week, a Microsoft data security guru suggested at a conference that corporate and government users would be wise to come up with automated processes to wipe clean hard drives and reinstall operating systems and applications periodically as a way to deal with malware infestations. What Microsoft is talking about is a utility from SysInternals, a company that makes simply awesome tools.

The crying shame of this whole story is that Microsoft has given up on Windows security. They have no internal expertise to solve this problem among their 60,000-plus employees, and they apparently have no interest in looking outside for help. I know any number of experts who could give Microsoft some very good guidance on what is needed to fix and secure Windows. There are very good developers Microsoft could call upon to help them. But no, their answer is to rebuild your system every few days and start over. Will Vista be any better?

Windows is a large ship with a small rudder, but for years Microsoft has vowed to make security a high priority. The Windows Vista feature overview gives strong mention to security, so I hope the gloomy prognosis by Cringley is over stated, but if history is any guide I wouldn’t expect a smooth ride for Windows users any time soon.

One Hundred Rules for NASA Project Managers is a useful collection of wisdom. I particularly like Rule #3, which states “Management principles still are the same. It is just that the tools have changed. You still find the right people to do the work and get out of the way so they can do it.”

The post dot-com career path is unattractive to prospective college students, but leaders in the technology industry have started to take aim at some of the myths which have emerged. An

IBM Developer Works interview with Gina Poole, Vice President for Innovation and University Relations for IBM, raises several good points about the viable future for CS, Engineering and Maths majors. Consider the following:

In the U.S., we’ve seen a decline in science and engineering degrees over the past ten years, while the number of newly declared computer science majors has actually declined by 32% over the last four years.

There are a couple of reasons: one is a myth, believed by parents, students, and high school guidance counselors, that computer science and engineering jobs are all being outsourced to China and India. This is not true. The percentage of the total number of jobs in this space is quite small — less than 5%. According to a government study, the voluntary attrition in the U.S. has outpaced the number of outsourced jobs to emerging nations. Further, for every job outsourced from the U.S., nine new jobs are actually created in the U.S.

The future is bright for software engineers, but it would be a lost opportunity for the economy and individual students if the negative mythology continues. The interview goes further to describe some of the gender divide, which Poole believes may be exacerbated by the perception of the lone programmer, when in fact software engineering is very much a collaborative effort.

Of course, in the midst of all the cheerleading for science and technology, let’s bear in mind health risks associated with the geek lifestyle.

The University of Virginia is in many respects a Southern institution, but a Cavalier Daily article explores the two sides to the debate.

There is little doubt that on the surface, the University boasts those stereotypical elements of Southern culture — a large proportion of the student body combines the words “you” and “all” to manufacture the quintessential “y’all,” seersucker pants are a positive fashion statement and the Confederacy’s capital, Richmond, is merely 70 miles away. A closer look shows, however, that the “Southernness” of the University has various interpretations by the members of the student body and the faculty.

At issue is also the matter of what constitutes being Southern. In my mind, I see three distinct Southern attributes:

1. Manners - Southern folk are just plain nice and civil to one another. Young women are called “miss” and a hat tip is still to be found.
2. Clothing - More gentlemen wear hats in the south, but also bow ties and the clothing is generally more sensible, although the casual trend of the 90s still affects much of the area.
3. Food - No where else can you find grits, and I would dare say that barbecue isn’t barbecue unless it is in the south.

But, it is Virginia still Southern? Not so much as South Carolina or the deep south, and I would safely write off most of Northern Virginia as yankee territory, but I believe Charlottesville and the University are indeed Southern. And that is a good thing, as I see it.

Joshua Ellis has put together a fascinating exhibit based on a recent trip to Trinity, the location of the Manhattan Project. The essay and photos are captivating to anyone interested in cold war history. Also of interest is how Ellis went about procuring funds for the exhibit. He raised donations on his site and agreed to publish the results under a Creative Commons license.

Apple continues to surprise and shock me, what with their two button mouse and recent switch to Intel processors, but now they have made it easy to dual boot Windows and Mac OS X on their new hardware. Can the apocalypse be any more at hand?

One thing is certain though. Apple has a much better sense of design and aesthetic than Microsoft. Take a gander at the Microsoft Windows logo, as seen on all official product packaging:

Now look at the svelt redesign from Apple:

I think Apple could make the devil look good. Apocalypse, indeed.

A recent study (original source) reveals that advertising works:

Children who spend more time watching television and movies and playing video games may be more likely to ask their parents for toys, food and drinks they saw in advertisements, according to a study in the April issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, a theme issue on children and the media.

File this under “duh”, as anyone who gives the matter any consideration will conclude that companies wouldn’t spend fortunes on marketing with no return on value. But the study raises a larger ethical issue: Is it right to influence the purchasing habits of children?

Marketers and the apathetic are the only segment not willing to protest advertising to children, but a growing number of parents are joining the opposition as they become weary of seeing their children used as a surrogate nagging device for corporate interests. If this seems like a dramatized explanation, consider the following excerpt from The American Prospect:

The advertising industry itself has funded dozens of studies on children designed to enhance marketing effectiveness. According to Selling to Kids–an industry newsletter, unfortunately, not a watchdog group–Saatchi & Saatchi hired clinical psychologists and cultural anthropologists to record more than 500 hours of interviews and observations of children between the ages of six and 20. Increasingly, such research is taking place in schools: According to USA TODAY, grade schools in Connecticut accepted $5,000 from a company in exchange for permission to interview 10- to 12-year-old students in classrooms after school. The Gepetto Group conducts focus groups and consults with psychologists to help businesses better understand how to market to teens by exploiting their vulnerabilities. “Teens are … an oppositional subculture, interested in shutting out the adult world,” the firm’s chief strategic officer explained in a Selling to Kids interview. “[T]here are enormous opportunities for the marketer who is able to understand both the reality and fantasy of teen life.”

Advertisers have no qualms about pitting child against parent if it means increasing profits. Is there a better way? Fortunately, there is. We can follow the lead of Sweden (and Finland), which prohibits advertising to children under the age of 12. In addition to other family-friendly public policy, they believe that children should be off-limits for advertisers and that parents should maintain autonomy over purchase decisions in the home.

This sounds like an idea where Liberals and Conservatives in America may find common ground, provided that awareness prevails over apathy.

While not an impossible hurdle to overcome, the hardest aspect of Capitalism is to inject some notion of long term planning to counter balance desire for short term profits. A Wired interview with Lester R. Brown, the author of Plan B, digs into some of this tension. Brown’s life work is devoted to raising awareness about the fragility of our ecosystem to captains of industry and policy makers. The following quotation speaks volumes about our blindness to truth:

There’s a quote by Oystein Dahle close to a decade ago now, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was for many years Exxon’s vice president for Norway and the North Sea. He said, “Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth.” That’s a lot of wisdom distilled into those two sentences.

Socialist nations, truth be told, have not had a good record on ecology either, but they generally acknowledged the failure. Intelligent people can, and will, disagree about the meaning of global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain and a variety of unsettling signposts, but our inability to craft policy to err on the side of caution is our poverty of imagination — we fail to perceive the world as it might be if nothing changes, or worse yet we consume ourselves with the present at the expense of the future.

But many bright people see it another way. The future always works itself out. They point to population explosion worry-worts and explain how the census is leveling off before war, famine and disease do the job for us. Concerned social scientists in the early 20th century predicted that America would be thigh-deep in horse manure if we didn’t restrict horse-driven transportation. Today ecologically minded persons worry about carbon dioxide emissions for the auto, which made the manure epidemic a non-issue. Maybe we will reconfigure our lifestyles before it gets too bad.

But then again, maybe there is a tipping point when we exceed the Earth’s carrying capacity after decades of expedient decisions. Caution will cost us profits today and may well make no difference in the outcome — we have no guarantees and no crystal balls. Some advocates of restraining measures, such as the Kyoto Protocol, advance them only because they bridle industry, but the majority accept restrictions on industry as necessary to achieve the long view. Left to its own, Capitalism is incapable of honestly confronting the damage it may cause for future generations.

Update 11-April-2006: A new film, curiously titled An Inconvenient Truth, will debut this Summer and features former Vice-President Al Gore.

Update 18-April-2006: After sharing this essay, Warren Meyer shared a family story to illustrate the 19th century worries over the horse population, mentioned earlier.