Here’s a great article from Anya Kamenetz in Fast Company opining on why education focused on STEM, without an accompanying focus on creativity and innovation, is a fruitless long-term strategy for our economy. It makes some great points about the jobs at the top of the pyramid…the ones everybody wants…
Over the last several months, I have had the opportunity privilege to work on a project for the National Energy Policy Institute (NEPI).
The City of Tulsa requested a report on the unique attributes of Tulsa’s energy sector that contribute to the region’s expertise in both legacy and emerging energy technologies, and NEPI agreed to provide financial support for the project. The project’s sponsor at the City, then-Intergovernmental & Enterprise Director Chris Benge (he’s now at the Tulsa Metro Chamber) gave me a sense of what he might be looking for – but no definitive requirements. So – off I went to learn about Tulsa’s energy community, and the requirements and possibilities evolved over the course of the project.
A few months, several interviews, tours, a mostly-full Moleskine notebook, and several pots of coffee later, I’m proud to have researched, written, and managed the publication of “Tulsa: 2nd Century Energy.”
"2nd Century Energy" provides an accessible overview and high-level analysis of Tulsa’s energy industry, highlights area businesses on the leading edge of the new energy economy, and provides details about the region’s energy-focused intellectual capital.
Along the way, I uncovered some fascinating resources and research under way in Tulsa, and came away with a new appreciation for how much the energy industry – both old and new - means to this region. I’m also very pleased to see that Tulsa’s Mayor, Dewey Bartlett Jr., is featuring 2nd Century Energy in his public speaking, and on the website of the Office of the Mayor.
I met some great, passionate, and innovative people in the course of researching and writing this report, especially the professionals that helped make publication possible. Graphic design and printing management was provided by Greg Rex and Nicole Morgan of Tulsa-based Rex PR. Both Greg and Nicole were great collaborators to help bring the project to completion – I hope we get a chance to work together on future projects, and I highly recommend their work.
I posted about Third Way’s “Taxpayer Receipts” project back in October. Since Tax Day is fast approaching, it seemed like a good time to go back and see where the project stands. Third Way – moderate-progressive think tank, if you recall – built a calculator which, when you to plug in your 2010 Federal taxes paid, shows you a breakdown of where your money went. When I last checked, it was a policy paper and a good idea. Now, it’s operational:
The receipt is ordered by percentage of where your money goes, with Social Security (20.4%) and Defense (20.2%) claiming the lion’s share, and Medicare close on their heels.
Clicking on a major category shows you some sub-categories and breakdowns in the same family. For example, clicking “Arts and Culture” ($7.20 for the year for me) yields that I contributed something like $1.44 to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Economic Development Administration – under the “Trade and Economic Development” header – got $1.01 from me. The striking information from the receipt is really that $.537 of every $1.00 remitted via Federal taxes is going to pay for the first three items on the list.
So – take your Form 1040 and drop in the “Total Tax” number from Line 60. Then maybe we can have a reasonable conversation about where our money goes. Take “Foreign Aid” – a January 2011 Gallup Poll found that 59% of Americans think the US should cut foreign aid. Another poll (this one by CNN in mid-March 2011) found that respondents thought the US was spending about 10% of its annual budget on foreign aid. We actually spent… 0.6%. That’s the difference in an informed public with an easy-to-read receipt: closing the knowledge gap without making a value judgment about whether or not that percentage is appropriate or represents too little or too much, and showing us where to get the most “bang for our buck” when it comes to reducing item 6 – “Net interest payments” – the amount we spend to service our debts.
Image from “Pearl District Design Plan.”
The Pearl District – a near-downtown neighborhood with a lot of history and a lot of lingering challenges here in Tulsa – is working hard to reinvent itself. Convenient to downtown, highways, and entertainment districts, the neighborhood has struggled for years to reestablish itself as a mixed-use, pedestrian friendly place to live and work. Organizers see it as a vital addition to downtown revitalization projects, providing some continuity and a landing place for people who don’t want to live downtown per se, but who frequent the ongoing developments there.
Take a look at the satellite image of the district currently, and the planned use map provided by the Pearl District Association. The “6th Street Infill Plan” is available here from the City of Tulsa, but the PDA and the City have gone even further, with a design plan including a canal feature. There is a pilot project for a form-based code (a personal favorite idea) - creating a look and feel without dividing usage zones like current zoning requires. They’re stretching, but people thought that turning a disused warehouse district with a drainage ditch into an entertainment area in Oklahoma City was a stretch too...
I’ve posted about the Better Block project in Oak Cliff a couple of times – this looks to be Tulsa’s experiment with the idea. Tulsa’s Young Professionals “Tulsa Urbanists” work crew has a take on the Better Block planned: “Polishing the Pearl” – coming up in April.
From distressed neighborhood to vibrant place to play and live – improving property values, generating sales taxes, and reusing valuable space… This is the heart of economic and community development. It's going to take some time, but this is going to be fun to watch.
The Brookings Institution’s “Hamilton Project” is sponsoring a competition to encourage new and innovating thinking on economic policy which focuses on US job creation and / or enhanced productivity. $15,000 for the winning proposal, and a split of $10,000 to place and show isn’t a king’s ransom, but the incentive is real, and the prestige of winning the competition is likely the greater payoff.
From the competition site: “The competition is open to academic, business and policy professionals who can demonstrate an original policy solution for increasing employment and productivity within two years of its implementation.” This kind of competition has the potential to generate unique ideas from outside of typical policy circles – here’s hoping that some much-needed innovations result from the scrum of ideas. If I think of something good, maybe I’ll apply. Anybody want to share an idea, the writing duties, and perhaps some prize money?
Back in September I posted about the Better Block Project in Oak Cliff - the Dallas neighborhood that is shaking up the status quo with a focus on redeveloping a "cool" community in a formerly dilapidated neighborhood. Since then, BetterBlock.org has come online as a stand-alone home for the project, and the "how-to" pointers are still easily accessible. Better still - the blog on the front page updates news from Better Block projects and experiments around the country. It's catching on - Houston, New York, Boston projects are all coming up, according to the news feed - and it represents a real potential for demonstrating citizen-sourced redevelopment plans for our cities. Place matters, and these guys are helping to show the way.
Tools You can Use
I thought I’d share some of the tools and services that I use to make my working life run just a tad better. You may have better ideas – and if so, I hope you’ll leave a comment and point me in the right direction.
Google Chrome (with extensions)
Chrome is light, fast, and reliable. After a few days of using it, both Firefox and Internet Explorer will likely seem ponderous. Like most, but not all browsers, Chrome offers a family of extensions from a crowdsourced development community – some useful, some not. I’ve loaded these five:
1. “Awesome Screenshot” – useful for quickly capturing, editing, and exporting browser screen captures.
1. “IE Tab” – lets you run a Chrome tab that mimics Internet Explorer – since some pages will only work when viewed with IE.
2. “Evernote” – I’ll talk about Evernote later, but this extension lets you quickly capture selected text and drop it into an Evernote note. Useful to help you ingest little tidbits of information that you might want access to later without bookmarking a whole page or site.
3. “LastPass” – I’ll talk about LastPass in a minute, too. This is the browser plugin for a password vault.
4. “HoverZoom” – This just enlarges pictures on some sites when you mouse over them. Seems especially handy on e-commerce and social networking sites.
Adobe cooked up PDF, so we all went out and downloaded Acrobat Reader. But, unless you want to spend the money on Adobe’s pay-to-play products, reading PDFs is about all you can do. Enter “Nitro PDF Reader.” For a free reader, it is feature rich. You can add text to pages, place sticky notes, stamp signatures, and export text and images. There are some nice collaboration tools too. So far – Nitro’s PDF writer seems to be a bit behind, but not dramatically so – and they’ve got some work to do on the browser plugin and snapshot tool. For a free, early release, it is worth your time.
Evernote is a digital pad of Post-It Notes on overdrive. You can capture quick notes, clips from around the web, and retain them in organized, searchable “notebooks.” Since it is cloud-based, you can access your notes anywhere, including over all the major smartphones via custom (and free) apps. You also get a customized email address with your Evernote account. Add this to your email address book, and you can fire off a quick note to yourself from wherever inspiration strikes you. The free version has a 40MB monthly upload limit (which don’t seem to be a problem for mostly text-based notes) – and a premium service is available for $5 per month.
Ta-Da Lists is a dead-simple free web-based to-do list organizer. You make a list, add items, and check them off when they’re done. You can keep multiple lists, and edit items as necessary. Like I said – simple, but useful!
LastPass is a password vault. You remember your LastPass master password, and then use it to fill in password for individual sites. It has a built in password generator, so you can change your site passwords to something secure like a 10 or 12 character random combination of upper and lower-case letters, and numbers. In all honesty – it takes a little messing around with it to get comfortable with how to use it properly – but with browser plugins for easy access, once you have it up and running, you’ll likely enjoy having the kind of control it offers. There is a premium service ($1.00 per month) for those that want to use LastPass on a smartphone.
Paint.Net is a free Windows-based photo editor. It is fully functional, and the interface is much easier to use than GIMP. For fast editing, quick graphics, and the non-professional user, Paint.Net is probably all the editor you’ll need.
And – of course:
Posterous hosts this site. It is simple to get started, and robust enough to handle all sorts of uses, from personal blog to project team website. I’ve used it for both, and have been very satisfied. Once established, you just email your post to your Posterous blog, and the site uploads your newest entry. It does a good job of handling attachments for text, photos, and documents as well.
I was fortunate to attend the Tulsa Town Hall lecture by eminent astrophysicist Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, today. Tyson is an engaging speaker, and provides a manageable point of access to the cosmos, physics, and the sheer vastness and mystery of the universe as we currently understand it. Besides that, he’s kind of funny, to boot. If you get a chance to check him out – you should. Tyson is also an outspoken advocate for increased investment in science and engineering, as well as “STEM” education – science, technology, engineering, and math. He closed his presentation with a couple of maps. I had to go track them down – they were compelling.
Tyson provided a slide that showed the scientific output of the world – as gauged by peer-reviewed scholarly articles. The relative outputs of various nations are shown stretching the size of their country of origin’s boundaries in proportion to the outputs of other nations (source after the jump):
The map is striking. Africa almost disappears – and South America and Central Asia don’t fare much better. Japan, Europe, and the US loom large. Check out the supporting data HERE. Dr. Tyson pointed out an interesting correlation – the places with high output also tend to have much higher standards of living – it makes sense. It is, however, the second map he shows that tells the more interesting story. The map below shows the growth in science output from 1990 to 2001. It shows who is make more recent investments in science.
Where the top map shows China in a smaller role – the bottom map shows Chinese scientific output exploding. Europe appears even bigger than before – South America returns to the map (thanks to Argentina and Brazil). You might notice – the US shrinks in relative importance. So – while the US is still putting out a vast amount of science – others are coming on strong – and picking up the pace faster than the US. Source for the growth map is HERE.
So – where did this map come from? Check out WORLDMAPPER. This is an intriguing way to look at data on a global level. They’ve got around 700 maps which “distort” borders to relative sizes on various subjects: from human poverty, to container ports, torail networks. For something equally striking – take a look at the comparative map for numbers of illiterate women.
This is indeed the “World as you have never seen it before” – Worldmapper’s tag line, not mine – and perhaps it brings some clarity beyond our usual view of the world as shaped by familiar borders.
It is political season of course, with election day less than a month away.
I found this "robocall" waiting for me when I arrived home.
You just don't mess with a cowboy's guitar. Drunk or not.
Moderate-progressive think tank “Third Way” has an interesting proposal: provide taxpayers with an itemized receipt for the taxes they pay. Here is an example, based on the breakdown for the “median income” taxpayer in the US (earning $34,140 per year):
The authors note that the Social Security Administration already produces something like this for individual taxpayers each year – so it is both feasible, and readily attainable. This strikes me as good, transparent public policy. Pushing aside the partisan rhetoric that would inevitably accompany this kind of “full disclosure,” (imagine the wrangling over what makes the list, and the wording!) it brings perspective to our national spending priorities.
The authors point out the pervasive and persistent belief that the US spends excessively on foreign aid – more than Social Security or Medicare, when in fact it appears in 11th place on the example receipt. Interestingly, in their example it also appears directly above “Education Funding for Low Income K-12 Students.” It isn’t a stretch to see how this kind of information could lead to better discussions about how we spend our money, and the relative importance we’ve placed on one set of programs and services versus another.
One additional thought: I would love to see this implemented at a state level as well.
