Americans Want Expanded and Better Funded Public Transportation

Two-thirds of Americans strongly support increased public transportation options.
As Americans, we are famously known for our wanderlust; we cannot stand to be hemmed in. But with our current transportation system, we are feeling increasingly trapped in an auto-centric world and want out.

A poll released today by Smart Growth America and Transportation for America reveals the extent to which Americans want broad access to a variety of transportation choices, an expanded system, and double the amount of federal funding currently allocated to public transportation.

These results were not just found in big metropolitan areas. In rural areas, 79% of those polled felt that the U.S. would benefit from expanded and improved rail and bus systems, and 82% suburbanites support increased transportation freedom.

In a country that loves choice, 73% of Americans claim they have no option but to drive as much as they do (only 1 in 5 Americans polled took public transportation in the past month—even including walking). Access is the principle barrier for most polled: approximately 47% of those polled said that public transportation is not available in their community and another 35% lament the inconvenience and timing of routes.

Americans want this status quo to change. Those polled want choices and expanded transportation options. Two-thirds of those polled strongly agree to greater transportation options so that they have the freedom to choose how to get where they need to go. And even in this economic climate, a close majority of 52% supports raising taxes in order to expand and improve public transportation in their community. From rural communities to urban areas, those polled want increased public transportation funding.

Currently, 80 cents out of every federal transportation dollar is allocated to highways, while only 17 cents go towards our public transportation system, which includes ferries, rail systems, bus lines, and light rail. Those polled accurately guessed that the federal government hands out a paltry sum to public transportation. While the average guess was 19 cents to the dollar, the mean ideal allocation almost doubles the current spending, preferring that public transportation receive 37 cents to every dollar.

And the benefits of a larger and better funded public transportation system? Choice and expanded mobility were seen as the top preferred results and the most likely outcomes of increased funding. Broadened transportation choice was closely followed by the preference that public transportation be funded so that low-wage workers, seniors, and disabled have an easier time getting where they need to go.

Beyond the basic desire to improve car-less travel from point A to point B, more than 2/3 of those polled also saw co-benefits of reduced traffic congestion, quality of life and safety improvements, cheaper transportation options, and the creation and maintenance of good, long terms jobs. And a majority of those polled also agreed that increased funding will reduce our dependence on foreign oil, reduce air pollution, and global warming emissions. Not bad options.

So what does this all mean? Americans throughout the country, from those in rural communities and to those in bustling cities, support public transportation and want to see federal dollars improve and expand the existing system. We are a country that prizes the freedom to travel without hindrance and an expanded public transportation for the 21^st century is completely aligned with this sentiment.

Yellow Springs Passive House

Andrew Kline (L) and Alex Melamed of Green Generation Building Company, LLC on the construction site of what is believed to be the first passive house in Ohio.

The 1800 sq. ft. interior will include a loft space.

A large kitchen window looks out the rear of the house.

Just a few years ago, the passive house was Europe's best kept secret. Pioneered in Germany, the concept relies on super insulation to reduce heating, air conditioning and other energy costs. The idea was slow to catch hold in the U.S. and, according to Andrew Kline, President of Green Generation Building Company, there may be less than thirty such homes in the country today. He believes the passive house his company is building on Dayton Street between High Street and Bill Duncan Park will be the first in Ohio.

As the Blog arrived to get the story, Pat Murphy of Community Solutions, a long-time advocate of passive housing in Yellow Springs was on site. Murphy said Community Solutions has been filming the progress of the construction.

The construction of the 1800 sq. ft. house is indeed unique. According to Green Generation Design Director Alex Melamed, the design was sent to Enercept, a company in South Dakota, which constructed elements of the building, including fully insulated sections of wall (SIPs for structural insulated panels), which were then shipped to Yellow Springs on two tractor trailers. The walls are 14' thick, the roof 24' and the floor 16' of solid Styrofoam sandwiched between oriented strand board (OSB).

In Germany, Kline said, the cost of the highly insulated construction has only resulted in a 10% increase in building costs. It remains to be seen how that will translate in the U.S. But, energy savings will be so significant that Kline says, 'The cost of utilities is built into the sale price.' For the house on Dayton Street, he estimates heating costs to be $87.00 per year.

The house, which is a demonstration project as well as a financial venture, is now available for purchase and is priced from $270,00 - $290,000 depending on its level of finish. The sooner a purchaser commits, the more input he will have in the way the house is finished. Kline expects the house to be completed by the end of June. There will be an open house.

Andrew Kline is the son of local woman Martha Kline and the grandson of noted local architect Jack Kline, who designed the Yellow Springs High School building.

To keep up with the progress of the construction, visit Yellow Springs Passive House on Facebook or www.greengenerationbuilding.com.

Click here for more photos.

Counting on being counted: Google Maps tracks census participation

Dear Council, Yellow Springs News and YS Blog:

Below is a Wall Street Journal article about Google partnering with US Census Bureau.

Please encourage citizens to participate in the 2010 Census!

Best Regards and Be Counted!

-- Dan Carrigan
Yellow Springs, Ohio

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Google Map Lets Users Track Neighborhood Census Participation

By Jean Spencer

Google and the U.S. Census Bureau unveiled a new online mapping feature Wednesday that tracks national Census participation rates and allows users to compare their neighborhood’s rate to those of other communities across the nation. Link to map: http://2010.census.gov/2010census/take10map/

The idea in part is to increase national response rates by fostering a feeling of friendly competition among different areas, Census director Robert Groves said, adding that the tool also increases awareness of the Census in general. On the Census site, users can scroll and click to access daily updates broken down by state, county, city and ZIP code. Users can zoom down to track how well neighborhoods are responding.

As of Thursday, 20% of the 120 million Census forms delivered to households last week are turned in, according to a colorful pop-up graphic on the Google map. “We are off to a pretty good start,” Dr. Groves said during a demonstration to reporters Wednesday. He said the early 2010 response rates are matching or surpassing 2000 rates.

As of Thursday, Montana, Iowa and Wisconsin held the highest rates. But that number will fluctuate as millions of Census forms are received. Leighton, Iowa, which had a population of 153 in the 2000 Census, now has the highest return rate among cities and towns, with 75%.

The information is updated daily at 4 p.m. EDT, from data collected and verified from the day before. In other words, the public has access to yesterday’s rates, today. Only official Census forms returned by mail are included in the percentages. Data collected by personal interviews, such as in rural counties in Alaska, are omitted.

How you emerge from your brain

by Holly Anderson, contributor
IT IS common to feel uncomfortable when reading about new neuroscience techniques that seem to encroach on the sacrosanct realm of our hidden inner lives. And it is understandable to feel even more uncomfortable about the notion that our actions are dictated by processes in our brains, calling into question a place for moral responsibility. This discomfort pervades Eliezer Sternberg's new book.
In My Brain Made Me Do It, Sternberg dips into philosophy, psychology and neuroscience research as he considers the various evidence that suggests we lack free will and thus a foundation for moral responsibility. Strange cases from psychology and neuroscience pose problems for a naive view of human agency. What if your hand started grabbing things of its own accord? Or if you were compelled to use every tool you found in front of you?


Keep some grains of salt handy as you are reading. The tone Sternberg
takes to the possibility of widespread acceptance of neurobiological
determinism is of the sky-is-falling variety. With over 40,000
practising neuroscientists, it isn't hard to find juicy quotes
dismissing the existence of free will, but it is inaccurate to
characterise this as the general attitude of the field.

Sternberg
addresses two related problems throughout the book. The first concerns
the wide range of influences on our actions that we are unaware of at
any given moment. If an action I take is triggered by unconscious
sensory input, am I employing free will?

The second, known
as the 'causal exclusion problem' in philosophy, is the one that really
disturbs Sternberg. You, in the grand sense of 'you' - your thoughts,
emotions, volition and moral reasoning - depend on neuronal processing
in your brain. If the firings of any neuron are enough to cause the next
neuron to fire, your brain runs all on its own. There is no extra place
in which you, as a higher-level, conscious being, can direct
proceedings and assert free will. This clockwork determinism undermines
any causal role we could have in our own actions - and, by implication,
our responsibility for those actions.

So what is Sternberg's answer to the problem of free will? Emergence.
This concept can be roughly summed up as 'the whole is more than the
sum of the parts'. Just as temperature emerges from a collection of
molecules even though it does not exist at the level of individual
molecules, free will, Sternberg argues, emerges from otherwise
deterministic processes at the level of neurons.
Philosophers
and scientists have been debating the merits of emergence in solving
the free will problem since the 1920s. Rather than providing an account
of exactly how free will could emerge from deterministic processes,
Sternberg offers an analogy with the theory of continental drift. When
it was first proposed, scientists dismissed it because it lacked a
mechanism to account for how such massive objects could move over huge
distances. Sternberg's moral is that even though we don't know how free
will emerges, we will some day, so we shouldn't throw moral
responsibility out the window just yet.
Unfortunately,
Sternberg misses his own point, and falls prey to the very line of
thinking that he criticises. He offers 'reflective introspection' as an
alternative for addressing moral problems instead of what he calls the
algorithmic approach, in which rules are computed to yield firm answers
in decision-making situations.
But at the end of the day,
whether we reason with rules or by transcending rules, we still can't
escape the fact that we reason using our brains. The problem
comes in thinking that we are somehow sufficiently separate from our
brains that those brains can tell us what to do or vice versa. Your
brain, for better or for worse, is just the mechanism for being you.
Holly Andersen is a philosopher of science at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada

Book
information
My Brain Made Me Do It: The rise of neuroscience
and the threat to moral responsibility by Eliezer Sternberg
Published
by Prometheus Books
$21

Klip House

[Image: The Klip House system by Interloop architects].

The Klip House by Texan architects Interloop is a project dating back to 1997-2001. The architects describe it as 'a delivery system that provides the physical and operational infrastructure for trade corporations to participate in the production, delivery, and servicing of housing.'

Not limited only to housing, however, the Klip system was seen as being just as easy to use for hospitals, police stations, and more—even, why not, a pink auto-detailing shop.

[Image: A pink auto-detailing shop in the Klip system by Interloop].

At the time, Interloop had become 'frustrated,' they explain, by 'Federal and State initiatives that provide financial assistance to qualified families and individuals by awarding housing 'vouchers' to serve as the down payment on a house. In its current format, the voucher system distributes a mass of capital such that one voucher equals one house.' However:

We were, and are, frustrated with a design system that is constricted by insurance companies, loan officers, municipalities, and contractors, etc. and decided to look at the overall economic impact that these vouchers might have if they were bundled, rather than distributed. Instead of designing a single house that has very little impact to the housing industry, we worked with the idea of consolidating the vouchers to pay for a housing platform, or infrastructure. We needed to work outside of the home mortgage process in order to gain some ground.

In other words, producing new housing also means producing new (non-predatory) ways to finance those housing options—architects have to rethink systems of payment as much as they have to rethink the design parameters of prefab componentry.

[Images: The Klip system by Interloop].

Klip House, seen here, 'is essentially engaging financing systems that exist in automotive and product industries'—a statement which comes with a slight twinge of nostalgia for those heady, Greg Lynn-inspired days of the late 1990s when automobile assembly was the reigning model for cutting-edge architectural thesis projects. If your BMW could be assembled offsite and to your every specification, down to heated seats, aerodynamic rear spoilers, and the perfect JBL sound system, why couldn't the architecture you live in follow suit?

Seamless, robotic, and delivered perfectly on schedule, the modular assembly of housing—borrowing assembly line techniques taken from Ford, Saturn, or Lexus—was to lead the way to our architectural future.

In any case, the Klip house itself was at least partially inspired by the boot clips of skis and snowboards. That is, its foundation would operate through a terrestrial 'binder,' or 'adjustable footing system,' onto which new rooms or components could be clipped (thus the house's name).

The binders thus allow for 'an open array of housing components [to] be added, released, interchanged, upgraded and rearranged' at will. 'The architectural contribution,' Interloop points out, 'is simply to introduce a single enabling technology, i.e. the binder, to generate or illicit response.'

[Images: Inspired by the boot clips of snowboards: the Klip's binder system by Interloop architects].

Further, the Klip's 'components are available in three and six foot widths, each made with a variety of options and upgrades,' and they can be either purchased or leased. This adds a Smart Car/iPod-like personalization to the housing design and procurement process.

Your house, hospital, police station, nightclub, field kitchen, mobile writing lab, counterfeit university space, or auto-body shop can thus be expanded (or shrunken)—let alone recolored, retextured, and resurfaced—based on immediate personal and economic needs.

[Image: The Klip House by Interloop architects].

Read more at the architects' website.

Technician vs. Management

A man in a hot air balloon, realizing he was lost, reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended further and shouted to the lady "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am"

The woman below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."

"You must be a technician," said the balloonist.

"Actually I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct but I've no idea what to make of your information and the fact is, I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip."

The woman below responded, "You must be in Management."

"I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is, you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault..."

Blind violinist injured in Haiti quake fighting the odds, once again - washingtonpost.com

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 7, 2010; A03

MIAMI -- As darkness fell on what was left of his music school in Haiti, Romel Joseph found a distraction for his pain and fear. He imagined himself performing Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto. His right hand gracefully slid the bow and his left hand caressed the violin's neck as his fingers glided along the strings.

But the soaring notes he heard were an illusion. The blind, Julliard-trained musician was buried beneath the rubble of the New Victorian School in Port-au-Prince. Joseph's left hand was broken and his right hand was impaled by nails from a wall that had fallen on him. A second wall had crushed his right leg and pinned his heel. Trapped for 18 hours, he wondered if he would survive -- or if he would want to.

"I said, 'Oh my God, am I going to die? Will I ever play violin again?' " Joseph recalled. "My hands, they were made for the violin. I had the feeling that I had lost everything. The violin was life."

The first question was answered by doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, who saved his life after the January earthquake that devastated his birth country. But the second question -- "Will I ever play . . . again?" -- could remain unsettled for a long time for Haiti's most-recognized violinist.

Across the United States, friends and strangers have rallied to aid Joseph, 50, who lost his pregnant wife, Myslie, 26, in the rubble. Last month, Andover Chamber Music in Massachusetts held a benefit concert for him. Another concert at San José State University was aimed at helping the New Victorian School's 300 students, who had already gone home before the quake struck. Stevie Wonder gave Joseph a keyboard to aid his recovery. South Miami middle schoolers brought their instruments to Joseph's bedside and played Mozart for him.

"Romel is a treasure in Haiti," said Gwendolyn Mok, a pianist whose concert at San José State raised $4,000. She said Joseph's survival is "a story of hope. Romel lived for a reason. His mission is not finished. He has work to do."

'God's perfect machine'

Overcoming a crushed hand is no small accomplishment for any musician. The hand is "God's perfect machine," a marvel of tissue, tendons and 27 bones, said Thomas Wiedrich, an associate professor of clinical surgery at Northwestern University Medical School. When a hand is crushed, tissue and tendons often fuse, tightening fingers and limiting their range. "For musicians, it can affect the psyche a great deal," Wiedrich said. "Certainly, we've had experiences with musicians where an individual with this kind of injury . . . does not play again."

It took virtuoso pianist Leon Fleisher 30 years to resume playing with two hands after focal dystonia, a neurological condition, incapacitated his right hand. Acclaimed German violinist Augustin Hadelich, who suffered severe burns to his face and upper body in a 1999 house fire, had 20 surgeries and extensive rehabilitation to regain the use of his bow arm and hand.

Joseph has dealt with adversity before: He overcame blindness as a boy to master the violin. He said he'll work to do it again, gesturing with his swollen left hand. He sat upright in his hospital bed, typing into a computer, gingerly flexing his ailing fingers, forcing them to bend, flex and work as they once did.

While Joseph is grateful for the care he's getting, he also betrays flashes of frustration, fussing at the nurses, turning up his nose at the soup, and pecking at the keys longer than his physical therapist would like.

"He doesn't like being a patient," said his doctor, Patrick W. Owens. "He has all these things he really wants to do outside the hospital and sees this as a big setback to his plans."

Owens, a hand specialist, didn't know who Joseph was when they met. "His number just came up and I was there," he said. But after learning that he was a violinist, "there was some pressure" to perform a perfect operation "on someone whose hand is their entire being and purpose."

A life in music

Joseph, a U.S. citizen, has long divided his time between Miami, where he founded the nonprofit Walenstein Musical Organization, and Port-au-Prince. He was born in the heart of Haiti, in Gros-Morne, and went blind because his parents couldn't afford to treat infections in his eyes.

At the St. Vincent's School for handicapped children, a nun put a violin in his hands. "I used to practice eight and nine hours a day," Joseph said. "You get a lot of attention. You learn a lot of pop songs that the girls like. Plus, I loved classical and I played piano and violin and the viola. I was the best of everyone because I spent so much time practicing."

In 1978, Joseph, then 19, earned a scholarship to the University of Cincinnati's College-Conservatory of Music. After graduating, he went to Boston to study piano tuning at Tanglewood, the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Mok, who studied with him, said Joseph tapped through the streets with a white cane, and had memorized dozens of symphonies.

In 1985, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to attend the Julliard School, where he earned a master's degree in music. A year later, he went back to Haiti, where he founded the New Victorian School in 1991 to teach music to children who needed a way to escape poverty.

On the day of the earthquake, Joseph was exiting the third floor of the school when it shook. "I remember two steps: holding the door open and the door being gone," he said.

When he regained consciousness, the pain from his injuries was agonizing. He called for help through the mountain of rubble, and voices answered through the holes. "We hear you."

Friends and co-workers pulled Joseph out just before noon on Jan. 14, and he was flown to Jackson Memorial the next day. He wouldn't learn until later that his wife, who was two floors below him when the school collapsed, was dead. Her body still hasn't been recovered. She was seven months pregnant.

Joseph is mourning her and their unborn child even as he tries to heal and rehabilitate his hands.

His doctor is optimistic about his recovery. "I think his chances of playing are very good," Owens said. "X-rays showed his bones are healing straight."

But Joseph isn't sure he'll ever be the same musician. "These guys have no idea what it takes to play the violin," he said. He plays the donated keyboard for exercise and spends five hours a day breathing pure oxygen in a hyperbaric chamber to help his hands mend more quickly.

"Violins require dexterity," Joseph said. "My hand will heal -- that won't be a problem. Will I play with it? That's a whole different story."

source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/06/AR2010030602313.html

IE6 Funeral

Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010 in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc. Internet Explorer Six, known to friends and family as 'IE6,' is survived by son Internet Explorer Seven, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer Eight.

Venue Change:
Apparently even more people want to see IE6's cold dead body than we imagined. To better accommodate the overwhelming response, we're changing the venue.
On Thursday, March 4, 2010, at 7:00 p.m., we'll gather with fellow IE6 friends and loved ones at Forest Room 5, 2532 15th Street, Denver, CO 80211-3902 to pay our respects.
Those unable to attend the funeral are asked to send flowers.

Thursday, March 4, 2010
7:00 pm
Forest Room 5
Funeral attire is encouraged.

Come mix & mingle with Denver’s top IE6 mourners. We’ll have a special time of remembrance, delicious tapas, and a full service bar.

Prizes will be awarded for the best IE6 memory & the best dressed!
IE6funeral.com is brought to you by Aten Design Group