When walking to school becomes a political act

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NYTimes: Why Can’t She Walk to School? :

Certain realities also shape these procedures, such as the schedules of working parents, unsafe neighborhoods and school transportation cuts.

But when these constraints are mixed with anxiety over transferring children from the private world of family to the public world of school, the new normal can look increasingly baroque. Now, in some suburbs, parents and children sit in their cars at the end of driveways, waiting for the bus. Some school buses now have been fitted with surveillance cameras, watching for beatings and bullying.

Children are driven to schools two blocks away. At some schools, parents drive up with their children’s names displayed on their dashboards, a school official radios to the building, and each child is escorted out.

When to detach the parental leash? The trip to and from school has become emblematic of the conflict parents feel between teaching children autonomy and keeping them safe. In parenting blogs and books, the school-bus stop itself is shorthand for the turmoil of contemporary parents over when to relinquish control.

NPR: Poverty Rates Highest Since 1997 (and maybe higher than in the last 50 years?)

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NPR: Poverty Rates Highest Since 1997:

David Johnson, a senior statistician with the Census Bureau, says the increase is clearly linked to jobs.

“Children in nonworking families, children in female-headed households, children in families that receive food stamps, their poverty rate didn’t change much,” Johnson says. “Whereas children in earner households, the poverty was affected a lot. So you see a lot of it tied to the earnings change in 2007, 2008.”

That makes a lot of people nervous. If things were so bad last year, what about now?

“These numbers are grim — grimmer than we expected,” says Robert Greenstein, head of the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He notes that joblessness continues to rise.

“This creates a very serious concern, that if we already were at just under 40 million Americans in poverty in 2008 — before the biggest increases in unemployment — poverty is going to go much higher than that in 2009 and 2010,” Greenstein says.

In fact, he predicts that it could go higher than it’s been in 50 years.

What is ECM-SOA?

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EdLovesJava: ECM-SOA With Agile Attitude:

The first challenge is to think of our tooling as not a custom application, but more as a set of adaptable services, applications and integrations. This requires a change of thought.

Our previous efforts were to drop a monolithic application called a Content Manager into the middle of things, and then propose to change the business process around this application, ostensibly obsoleting the existing applications and ad-hoc processing to customizations within this new application.

During our previous attempt, we underwent a lengthy analysis phase and generated a 500 page requirements document detailing taxonomies, content types, work flows and templates that would solve our content management (web content management) needs. We then spent lots of time and treasure implementing these requirements. In the end, we built some of the requirements taking far longer and far more resources than anticipated, and we found that most the requirements and subsequently most of the customizations we built were wrong. The heroic content managers and brand managers made it work anyway, developing more ad-hoc, complicated and time consuming steps around yet another application that was supposed to help them. This story is not unique.

We must shift our processes as much as our technology. We are focusing on smaller efforts, more agility and more feedback and move away from 500 page requirements documents. To do this successfully, our architecture also needs to be agile and amenable to change. Our architecture must be a framework to grow on: to grow useful services, and to grow and integrate with useful applications. It must follow user demand that learns from using and refining our processes and tools.

Javascript links for September 8, 2009

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Ian J Cottee: Rhino on OS X Leopard

peter.michaux.ca: Server-Side JavaScript with Rhino and Jetty

gorilla3d.com: Programming Java With JavaScript

Steve Yegge: Code’s Worst Enemy

John Resig: Bringing the Browser to the Server (hmmm, jQuery on Rhino?)

YouTube: Google I/O 2008: Steve Yegge on Server Side JavaScript (transcript and slide links):

benne: On-the-fly JavaScript syntax checking in Emacs

Patrick Hunlock: Essential Javascript (nice tutorial)

The UNIX Way

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Kas Thomas of CMS Watch riffs on “The UNIX Way”, principals summarized by Mike Gancarz:

1. Small is beautiful.
2. Make each program do one thing well.
3. Build a prototype as soon as possible.
4. Choose portability over efficiency.
5. Store data in flat text files.
6. Use software leverage to your advantage.
7. Use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability.
8. Avoid captive user interfaces.
9. Make every program a filter

Read the whole piece.

Labor Day links

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Salon.com: Who are the wealth creators?:

Material production is only one of many activities that enrich a society. Public goods like safety and utilities and infrastructure and parks are part of the wealth that we share in common. So are many private goods that sometimes are best provided by the public, like public education and inexpensive healthcare.

By all means, then, let us celebrate virtuous capital owners and visionary investors as “wealth creators” on Labor Day. And let us celebrate as well as the other creators of private wealth, on the assembly line and in the office cubicle and in the janitorial closet, and the creators of public wealth in the form of roads and subways and parks, and the police officers and soldiers without whom a high level of public and private wealth could neither be created nor preserved. There are criminals and parasites among all classes of society, but most of us are wealth creators, and we deserve to be recognized as such.

FT.com: US families turn to food stamps as wages drop

NYTimes: Surge in Homeless Pupils Strains Schools

Change.org: 5 Things You Absolutely Must Know About Homelessness

True Homeless Stories: HearMyStory.org

(via Susie Madrak)

Hope you had a good Labor Day!

Questions regarding Inquirer and Daily News plans to charge readers of their websites

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I was contacted by someone who teaches journalism for my thoughts on Daily News and Inquirer plans to charge readers – how they might affect local bloggers who often link, comment, or refer to the news from those online publications. He asked three difficult questions.

  • Q: Do you plan to pay for your local Philadelphia online news?
    A: It counts upon how much it costs and what if offers. I hope they pursue a NPR-like membership model instead of putting up a paywall. In the end, it counts upon the value offered.
  • Q: Will you link to articles that your readers will have to pay to read?
    A: Not if behind a paywall. I will find free alternatives to link to (KYW1060, TV station websites,
    national news sources, and especially local independent sources).
  • Q: Any general reactions to how you think this will affect what you do and what other local bloggers do?
    A: Local blogging will not be effected all that much believe it or not. There are many free alternatives. What is of concern is that we are becoming less and less informed as a people. At a time when we need *more* exposure to the work of the the Inquirer and Daily News, there will be less. That’s tragic.

I have to add that my hopes are that the papers remain local and that the bankruptcy proceedings are favorable to the local ownership. While I may disagree on paywalls, I feel that the news organizations within the papers stand the best chance at survival that way.