Aaron Held’s Barcamp Summary and the terrific Twitter stream highlighted how much fun and illuminating it was.
Tag Archives: philadelphia
Pew: Rate of people moving into Philly increasing, rate of people leaving decreasing
“Pew Study Finds an Increase in People Moving Into Philadelphia, Outpacing the Rise in Departures”.
We still have a long way to go, but it is proof positive that Philadelphia’s long march towards being a great place to live and work is starting to get recognized.
Check out these upcoming events: Ignite Philly and TEDXPhilly.
Update: I’ve modified the headline of this post (previously: “Pew: More moving INTO Philly than leaving”) to better reflect the report’s findings. Terrific progress being made nevertheless. Go Philly!
I didn’t know who to go to for help – hunger in Philadelphia
The Philadelphia Inquirer profiles the lives of families going hungry in Pennsylvania’s First Congressional District, home of a few of my old neighborhoods, Kensington, Fishtown, Frankford in Philadelphia: “A Portrait of Hunger”.
There is no excuse for letting anyone go hungry in the richest country in the world. None. The article points to three main culprits: a lack of paying work, a lack of guidance to services that can help, and the bureaucratic complexity of applying for those services as root causes.
It was the same for us when I was growing up and when I was out on the streets, sleeping on trains, I didn’t know who to go to for help, or how.
The comments posted on the article really go far in showing how low our culture has become in kicking people when they are down and blaming them entirely for their circumstances.
We’re all in this together. For some great commentary on this, check out Susie Madrak’s latest post. Like her I can still remember when my family needed help. I can remember being in line for a block of cheese at Bridge and Pratt. I remember all too well the chuckles of some at school due to the quality of my Salvation Army and Goodwill bought clothes. I remember the Salvation Army Santa Claus visiting the family to drop off some toys to make our Christmas brighter.
None of us are 100% self made and choosing to belabor that some people need help, instead of offering TO help, does no one any good. Please, if you are able, find some way, any way, to lend a hand.
Resources:
Thank you Flyers
Philly.com: “A Flyers Season of Thrills”
Go Flyers!
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan press on has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge (1872-1933)
Press on!
The rain today will keep voters away
That tends to permit the status quo to keep on being so. If you don’t want that, then you need to make sure you get out and vote.
Awesome shot of a Philadelphia UFO?
Phillybits: “Subterranean UFO”.
I’ve walked by this a few times over the years. Always surprises.
Charlie Lord, RIP
“Charlie Lord, Mental Ward Photographer And Activist, Dies At Age 90”.
Charlie Lord’s work, which exposed the horrors of Byberry State Hospital here in Philadelphia in the 1940s, was recently profiled by NPR:
At Byberry, Lord sneaked a small Agfa camera in his jacket pocket. It was the camera he’d borrowed to take on his honeymoon. But he’d dropped it in a lake and then felt he had to buy the damaged camera from his friend. Now he could use it to take pictures to show conditions in the A and B buildings.
When no one was watching, he’d quickly shoot a picture without even looking through the viewfinder. “I’d try to fill the frame,” he says. “You know, not just have little people far away. I’d get up as close as I could. I was aware of composition. But the main thing was to show the truth.”
Over a few months, Lord filled three rolls of film, with 36 exposures each. His pictures showed the truth, in black and white. In the past, reformers and journalists like Dorothea Dix and Nellie Bly sneaked into institutions and wrote exposes about the horrific conditions there.
But Lord was one of the first to ever expose institutions by using the power of photography. “I just thought this would show people what it was like. It’s not, not somebody writing to describe something,” he says. “They can use flowery words or you know, do whatever they want. But if the photograph is there, you can’t deny it.”
Think you have statistical chops? Help predict homicides in Philadelphia
The Analytics X Prize is “to use statistical techniques and any data sets you can find to predict where crime, specifically homicides, will occur in the city”.
Drew Conway at Zero Intelligence Agents has posted some of his progress so far using spacial regression.
Mike Newall in Metropolis covers the state of Frankford, NE Philadelphia
We moved around Philadelphia a lot growing up but I ended up back in Frankford in my 20s which leads it to have a special place in my bones. Mike Newall, for the new online publication “Metropolis”, has written a must read series on the challenges taking place there in “The Frankford Story”.