We've repeatedly seen that the urban problems of poverty, crime, unemployment, education gaps and inequality are intertwined. They reinforce and feed off of each other: A child of parents who never went to college is less likely to go to college herself. Her educational development influences her employment prospects and the money she's likely to make over her lifetime. And the clustering of poverty in whole parts of town threatens to cut her children off from access to good schools and healthy neighborhoods.
A growing body of research over the past decade, though, suggests that one intervention in particular could have cascading effects on all of these seemingly intractable challenges: Get to children as young as possible, and you can change not only their life trajectories, but also the income inequality, social mobility (and tax revenues) of the places where they live. This doesn't mean spending more per student in struggling high schools, or giving rehabbed computers to second-graders. It means reaching low-income children by the time they're 3, or even younger. It means putting them in high-quality preschool.
Put a child in preschool, and that improves her chances of graduating college.
The latest research, from a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by James Heckman and Lakshmi Raut, concludes that a policy of free preschool for all poor children would have a raft of cost-effective benefits for society and the economy: It would increase social mobility, reduce income inequality, raise college graduation rates, improve criminal behavior (saving some of the societal expenses associated with it), and yield higher tax revenue thanks to an increase in lifetime wages.
Specifically, Heckman and Raut estimate that the percentage of children whose parents never graduated from college who go on to graduate themselves would rise from 6.71 percent to 9.45 percent. And such a preschool policy would reduce the percent of the population that falls in the long run into poor socioeconomic status, from 35.71 percent to 29.14 percent. (Heckman and Raut define poor socioeconomic status as families earning less than 70 percent of the average in the economy.)
Keep such a policy in place for years, and its benefits accrue from one generation to the next. Put a child in preschool, in other words, and that improves her chances of graduating college. But it also improves the future education and earnings prospects of her children and grandchildren. Obviously, the quality of a school that a child attends later in life matters, too. And we'd be foolish to invest in preschool without continuing to invest in poor children as they age.
But this mounting evidence suggests that we should be front-loading our investment in the most disadvantaged children during the ages 2-4, when their brains develop at an extremely high rate, and while they're learning social, motivational, cognitive and analytical skills. Preschool is when kids first learn to work together in teams, to resolve problems, to listen and cooperate – all skills that directly come into play in the workforce. And the earlier society in invests in children, the greater the return we get. As Heckman has previously explained:
Life cycle skill formation is dynamic in nature. Skill begets skill; motivation begets motivation. Motivation cross-fosters skill, and skill cross-fosters motivation. If a child is not motivated to learn and engage early on in life, the more likely it is that when the child becomes an adult, he or she will fail in social and economic life. The longer society waits to intervene in the life cycle of a disadvantaged child, the more costly it is to remediate disadvantage.
Earlier research by Heckman and others has calculated that every dollar invested in quality early childhood development yields a 7 to 10 percent return, per child per year, including even younger than preschool. Plot society's policy options on a graph, and they look like this, via Heckman:
In total, previous research [PDF] has concluded that about half of the inequality in lifetime earnings is due to factors that were determined by the time children turn 18.
The results from this latest study likely underestimate the full benefit that could come from modern preschool programs modeled, for example, on the Perry Child Development Center that has been touted as a blueprint by the Obama Administration. Heckman and Raut modeled their results on the findings of a series of longitudinal studies that followed children who attended private preschool in the late 1960s.
This idea would go well beyond what the government currently provides for Head Start (where the quality of the programs relative to enriched pilots is often poor, Heckman and Raut write, and where the long-term results have been mixed). The Obama Administration's own proposal – which involves raising $75 billion from higher tobacco taxes – sounds like a long shot in Washington. But all of this mounting evidence suggests that universal preschool would be a tremendously rational investment by society.
Imagine one solution that simultaneously addresses so many problems, particularly at a time when more children are being born into disadvantage in the U.S. than were just two generations ago.
“I've been inspired by Barbra Streisand and Shirley Bassey lately. Great divas with great style and unique looks.
Because I'm a grandmother in heart, I decided to wear floral patterns and mix them with see-through shirts. I guess you could describe my style a mix of tomboy and crazy catlady.”
As GeoCurrents has noted in several previous posts, leading scientific journals and influential media outlets often favor research in linguistics that makes strong claims that resonate with the general public. A recent paper by anthropologist Caleb Everett published in PLOS ONE, “Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives”, claims “that the geographic context in which a language is spoken may directly impact its phonological form”, based on a study of ejective sounds.
He may not be Mario Savio, but the right of 22-year-old Willian Barboza to write "fuck your shitty town bitches" on a speeding ticket he received in Liberty, NY, (he crossed that name out and devastatingly wrote "Tyranny") is the latest free-speech struggle for the New York Civil Liberties Union. The
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“In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.” ―Thomas Mann
The score for John Cage’s indeterminate composition “Fontana Mix” (image: BBC Radio 3)
With the development of music notation, music was set free from the delicate bonds of oral and aural traditions. A standardized, underlying structure meant that everything from Gregorian chant to “Johnny B Goode” could be preserved and proliferated with relative ease. However, beginning in the years after World War II, some more progressive musicians and composers began to think that the music staff might be more restricting than liberating and began to experiment with new, more expressive forms of graphic music notation.
American composer John Cage explored the use chance and indeterminacy in his musical compositions with the aim of erasing his own subjectivity from his music, the hand of the artists, as it were. To communicate his indeterminate “compositions,” to use the term loosely, Cage developed elaborate methods of graphic notation involving a series of transparencies. He first used this method in the 1958 score for “Variations I,” which consisted of six transparent squares – one with 27 points representing sound and five with five lines, representing any assigned musical value. The composition was derived by placing the squares on top of one another in any combination. Cage would continue to develop and expand this method throughout the 1950s and ’60s, as seen in the top image depicting the somewhat more elaborate score for “Fontana Mix.” Cage’s notation consists of four multi-channel cassette tapes, ten transparencies inscribed with tiny dots, one transparency bearing a straight line and ten sheets of paper on which colored squiggly lines were drawn, and a graph paper-like “staff.” The transparencies were used to derive coordinates that were then used to determine which tape was used, as well as the values of the sound from teh tape: length (in inches), volume, timbre, and so on. According to theAll Music Guide to Classical Music, Cage described the score as “a camera from which anyone can take a photograph.”
The score for Steve Reich’s “Pendulum Music” (image: Steven Reich, Writings on Music, 1965-2000)
Steve Reich’s score for “Pendulum Music” is a straightforward, written set of instructions describing how the piece is staged and performed. The above recording was made by Sonic Youth for their 1999 album SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century. Parts of the handwritten score are a little difficult to read so here’s a transcription:
“2, 3, 4 or more microphones are suspended from the ceiling by their cables so that they all hang the same distance from the floor and are all free to swing with a pendular motion. Each microphone’s cable is plugged into an amplifier which is connected to a speaker. Each microphone hangs a few inches directly above or next to it’s [sic] speaker.
The performance begins with performers taking each mike, pulling it back like a swing, and then in unison releasing all of them together. Performers then carefully turn up each amplifier just to the point where feedback occurs when a mike swings directly over or next to it’s [sic] speaker. Thus, a series of feedback pulses are headed which will either be all in unison or not depending on the gradually changing phase relations of the different mike pendulums.
Performers then sit down to watch and listen to the process along with the audience.
The piece is ended sometime after all mikes have come to rest and are feeding back a continuous tone by performers pulling out the power cords of the amplifiers.”
Brian Eno’s graphic notation for Music for Airports, published on the back of the album sleeve
In 1978 musician Brian Eno created the seminal album Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Eno coined the term “ambient” to describe this atmospheric soundscape and distinguish it from the canned “elevator music” pioneered by Muzak. In so doing, he created not just an album, but an entire genre of music. Eno was inspired by composers like Cage and Reich, but had no formal music training. When asked by an interview why he never learned to read music, Eno, who preferred to composes directly onto tape, replied:
“It wouldn’t be very useful for me. There have been one or two occasions where I was stuck somewhere without my tape recorder and had an idea, tried to memorize it, and since a good idea nearly always relies on some unfamiliar nuance it is therefore automatically hard to remember. So on those very rare occasions I’ve thought, ‘God, if only I could write this down.’ But in fact, quite a lot of what I do has to do with sound texture, and you can’t notate that anyway … That’s because musical notation arose at a time when sound textures were limited. If you said violins and woodwind that defined the sound texture, if I say synthesizer and guitar it means nothing – you’re talking about 28,000 variables.”
In lieu of traditional notation then, Eno created the graphics seen above, which seem to be more concerned with communicating a visual impression of the music and aren’t truly intended to be used as a guide for actually playing the music.
A page of the score to Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Polymorphia” (image: Ex Tempore)
Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Polymorphia” was commissioned by the North German Radio Hamburg in 1961. As the name suggests, the piece does indeed take various forms and changes dramatically from section to section. With “Polymorphia,” Penderecki was searching for new sonic possibilities and, if those possibilities include “terrifying haunted house music,” he absolutely nailed it. The composition is intended for 48 string instruments and emphasizes timbre rather than pitch, and the collision of sound generating bodies made of metal, wood, or leather – what music scholar Danuta Mirka refers to as the composer’s “primary materials”. The notation was inspired, in part, by electroencephalograms –visual measurements of brain activity. It eschews traditional measures in favor of a score divided into sections of variable length and, in some sections, further vertical divisions to mark each second, with a “total pitch space” describing the relative pitch of each instrument.
Page 183 of the score for Corenlius Cardew’s “Treatise” (image: Spiral Cage)
English composer Cornelius Cardew’s“Treatise” was written from 1963-1967. It consists of 193 pages of graphic notation that employs ambiguous numbers, shapes, and symbols that Carew intended to be interpreted by the performer. He suggests that performers agree on their own rules prior to the performance, but provides no other explicit instructions for interpreting the piece. In the “Treatise” handbook, Cardew offers additional, cryptic advice such as “Remember that space does not correspond literally to time” and “There is a great difference between: a) doing anything you like and at the same time reading the notations, and b) reading the notations and trying to translate them into action. Of course you can let the score work on previously given material, but you must have it work actively.” The only constant throughout “Treatise” is the thickly drawn “life line” at the center of the score. It has no intrinsic value but is often used by performers as a baseline reference for pitch or some other musical value. Ultimately, “Treatise” is notation as art form. As Carew says, “The notation is more important than the sound. Not the exactitude and success with which a notation notates a sound; but the musicalness of the notation in its notating.”
Chess notation overlaid onto an image of a musical chess match between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (Original Image: Parsons)
In closing, the half notation. I only count it as half because it uses a traditional notation system, just not a music notation system. In 1968 John Cage played a chess match against Marcel DuChamp as part of the collaborative performance, Reunion (pdf), which also featured electronic music by David Behrman, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor and Lowell Cross. Given his interest in chance, it’s no surprise that Cage conceived of the work, but it was composed by the aforementioned musicians. The board itself was designed by Cross and concealed photo-resistors, contact microphones, and connections to sound generators. During the match the movement of the pieces activated lights and electronic music, transforming the exhibition environment according to the movement of the pieces on the board. The art of the chess transformed into music and light, a sort of strategic synesthesia. It’s a fascinating idea. What would the Sicilian Defense sound like? Or a Queen’s Gambit?
The above examples represent both notation for experimental music and experimental notation for music. But they’re just of few of the many modes of graphic and experimental notation that have been explored by artists over the last 60 or so years. While some artists find restrictions inspiring –even if those restrictions are as seemingly limitless as music notation– others find that progress can only be made by shattering the accepted modes of production and communication. And while the results may not be always enjoyable, they’re undeniably interesting and represent a sincere effort to push an art form into unexplored territory. Avant-garde in the truest sense of the word.
"In Danish, the symbol is known as an 'elephant’s trunk a'; the French call it an escargot. It’s a streudel in German, a monkey’s tail in Dutch, and a rose in Istanbul. In Italian, it’s named after a huge amphora of wine, a liquid some Italian bookkeepers have been known to show a fondness for."
Once a bookkeepers’ shorthand, @ has become the fulcrum of our digital identities. How did that happen?
For a moment, let’s not think about the @ symbol in the way we usually think of it, as the fulcrum of an email address, the navel connecting us to our Twitter handles, or even just the weird a hanging out above the 2 key.
Let’s imagine it instead blinking upon a screen. It exists as our focal point in a Metaverse of text. It’s a world with endless layers, the geometries, architectures, and inhabitants of which are likewise described by symbols on our keyboard. And in this world, @ is our avatar: a logogram of power that, once inscribed, represents our identity in an entirely digital world.
This metaphor for the @ symbol may seem exotic, but it isn’t new. Some of the very first computer video games (called roguelikes) used @ to represent the player as he explored rudimentary ASCII dungeons. "This is you, and you are at this location within our cyber world."
More to the point, that’s how we still use it. Popularized and rejuvenated by its insertion before every Twitter handle, the @ symbol today is almost a pronoun. It has a very personal meaning for billions of people across the planet. It’s the symbol that means “digital me.”
What makes this such an incredible feat is that before until about 20 years ago, few people had ever used an @ symbol at all, and if they did, they used it in a very different way than they do now.
"If you look at how we use typography, the human brain seems to only have room in its mental character set for a finite number of characters," says Keith Houston, the author of the upcoming book Shady Characters: The Secret Life Of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks. "We’re just not willing to slot in new symbols, or change the meaning of old characters. We just don’t have the room."
So unlike words, the definitions of which tend to evolve through usage, the meaning of a symbol or character tends to be put in stasis by the cultural momentum behind it. The @ symbol, however, has done something unique, shrugging off centuries of momentum to evolve multiple times in the span of little more than a single generation.
Part of what made that accomplishment possible was the @ symbol’s obscurity to begin with. Ever since the 1500s, and for hundreds of years after, the only people who used @ were bookkeepers, who used it as a shorthand to show how much they were selling or buying goods for: for example, "3 bottles of wine @ $10 each."
The @ symbol has shrugged off centuries of cultural momentum to evolve multiple times.
Since these bookkeepers used @ to deal with money, a certain degree of whimsical fondness for the character developed over time. In Danish, the symbol is known as an “elephant’s trunk a”; the French call it an escargot. It’s a streudel in German, a monkey’s tail in Dutch, and a rose in Istanbul. In Italian, it’s named after a huge amphora of wine, a liquid some Italian bookkeepers have been known to show a fondness for.
Even with such cute names to recommend it, though, @ languished in obscurity for three and a half centuries, only ending up on a new invention called the typewriter when salesmen realized that accountants and bookkeepers were buying them in droves.
In 1971, however, a keyboard with a vestigial @ symbol inherited from its typewriter ancestors found itself hooked up to an ARPANET terminal manned by Ray Tomlinson, who was working on a little program he’d come up with in his goofing-off time to send messages from computer to computer. Tomlinson ended up using the @ symbol as the fulcrum of the lever that ultimately ended up lifting the world into the digital age: email.
"It’s difficult to imagine anyone in Tomlinson’s situation choosing anything other than the '@' symbol, but his decision to do so at the time was inspired," explains Houston on his blog. "Firstly, it was extremely unlikely to occur in any computer or user names; secondly, it had no other significant meaning for the operating system on which it would run, and lastly, it read intuitively--user ‘at’ host."
It was as simple as that, but through this one serendipitous accident of typography, @ became the navel of the digital body we now call the Internet. It stopped being a sign for how much something cost and became a symbol of an infinite number of end points on a digital umbilicus: an origin, a destination, or some point--terminating in a human--in the system in-between.
The @ symbol became the call sign for the dot-com bubble.
As email matured, and early mass-market Internet services like Prodigy and America Online became popular, @ became even more typographically unique. It stood alone on the keyboard as the one symbol known more for its association with the Internet than for anything else. And as multiple service providers and technology companies grappled with trying to mass-market this new “World Wide Web” to consumers, the @ symbol became the call sign for the dot-com bubble.
"In the late-'90s, the @ symbol actually became generic," Houston argues. "It was like Apple’s 'i’ prefix, or putting 'e’ in front of everything is today."
In fact, it became tacky. A symbol which had been chosen for email by virtue of its clarity, its elegance, and its relative obscurity became just another sticker in the box of cynical marketers looking to disguise analog companies and products for the turn of the millennium. Got something you want to jam to those console cowboys in cyberspace? Just put an “e-“ in front of it, slap a dot-com at the end, and replace all the a's with @ symbols. "Eat e-b@n@n@s! Dot com!"
Inevitably, the @ symbol as the internationally recognized logo for anything “cyber” became played out. Laughably so, in fact. Stumble across one of Europe’s remnant "CyberC@fes" today and the default reaction is a sort of bemusement and smirking superiority that we reserve for other quaintly naive cultural relics of the retro-future, like putting “2000” at the end of something or 1950s Popular Mechanics articles on robot housemaids. By the early 2000s, the @ symbol was pretty much dead except as the thing sandwiched in the middle of two halves of an email address.
But then Twitter happened, and the @ symbol reinvented itself yet again--this time purifying itself from a dot-com-era cliché into a rune of Internet identity.
When Twitter first launched in 2006, the service’s modus operandi was to offer a blogging platform tiny enough that it could be done by mobile (dumb) phones. The 140-character limit Twitter imposes upon tweets to this day is a relic from this time, in which any tweet needed to be short enough that it could squeeze inside a 160-character SMS text message. Consequently, Twitter was much more no-frills back then than it is now. In fact, when the service launched, it didn’t even have a reply mechanism. If you wanted to reply to someone’s tweet, you just sort of responded into the ether in any way you hoped might catch another user’s attention.
The @ symbol’s adoption as Twitter’s accepted reply mechanism happened organically, and took about eight months. The first use of an @ reply can be traced to Thanksgiving Day, 2006, when a couple of Yahoo UK programmers named Ben Darlow and Neil Crosby started using it (as they wrote at the time) as a "pseudo-syntax to let a Follower on twitter know that you’re directing a comment at them." Just two months later, the @ reply was the universal Twitter reply mechanism, and now, you can type @ and follow it with the name of pretty much anyone on any social network to direct a reply to them.
Two Yahoo UK programmers started using it @ as a 'pseudo-syntax to let a Follower on twitter know that you’re directing a comment at them.'
As with its use in email, it’s hard to imagine Twitter not using @ to have conversations. But as with email, the decision was inspired. It was relatively easy to type on T9 cell phone keypads, and read intuitively: You were directing a comment “at” someone else. But instead of being used as it is used in email--a symbol used to tell your computer that you want to direct a message to a specific person at a specific location--the @ symbol has now become something much more abstract: a one-character prefix that is used to identify a person’s digital presence on a social network.
Whether on Facebook, Flickr, or Twitter, type @ into almost any social network and you can direct a reply straight to another user. Just as in the earliest computer games, @ now clearly represents people who are inhabiting a digital world. "This is you. You are at here."
"All characters evolve in the way they are used, but the @ symbol’s evolution has been particularly striking," Houston says. "It was mundane for a long time, only to undergo a startling transition during the beginning of the computer revolution that put it at the center of the way we think about the Internet."
But how permanent is this meaning for @, and could it be upended by another revolution that completely changes its meaning for our children and their children?
"The @ symbol is pretty well associated with digital identity now, so it’s hard to see how it could be divorced from that," Houston claims. "These days, revolutions are getting incrementally smaller. The @ symbol has become our emblem for our online selves. I think that meaning is here to stay."
[Illustrations: Doodles via Shutterstock, Kelly Rakowski/Co.Design]
A new poll from Gallup shows that Americans’ support for physician-assisted suicide changes radically depending on whether or not “suicide” is used in the question’s wording.
When asked if the doctor of a patient with an incurable disease should be allowed “to assist the patient to commit suicide” at the patient’s request, 51 percent of Americans said it should be permitted. However, when the question was rephrased to ask if the doctor should be allowed “to end the patient’s life by some painless means” at the patient and their family’s request, support shot up to 70 percent.
Polarization across party lines also decreases when “suicide” is not used to describe the practice. The conventional framing solicits support for the practice from 60 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans, a gap that’s reduced to 71 and 68 percent with softer language.
Support for the question with “suicide” in its phrasing has fluctuated over the past two decades. Whereas it stood virtually at the same level of support as it does today in 1996, support reached a peak of 68 percent in 2001 before gradually falling over the next ten years. Meanwhile, support for the “by some painless means” phrasing has remained over 64 percent throughout that time frame. In the late 1990s, public visibility of physician-assisted suicide, or euthanasia, was high amidst ballot measures legalizing and attempting to repeal the practice in Oregon in 1994 and 1997, and the high-profile trial and arrest of Dr Jack Kevorkian in 1998-99.
The Vermont legislature passed a bill legalizing physician-assisted suicide in May, making it the fourth state to legalize the practice. Washington state and Oregon did so through ballot measures in 1994 and 2008 respectively, and a Montana court ruling made the practice legal in 2008. A bill similar to Vermont’s was defeated in the Maine House last Friday, and a Massachusetts ballot measure was narrowly defeated in the 2012 election.
Even outside of physician-assisted suicide, the language used to communicate end-of-life decisions has been shown to have significant effects. In May, University of Pittsburgh researchers showed that when asked whether CPR should be used on critically ill patients — a measure that only works 10 percent of the time — family members were much less likely to say yes to CPR if the decision was framed as “allow a natural death” (49 percent) rather than “do not resuscitate” (61 percent).
Earth’s atmosphere hit 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide last month — the highest level humans have ever experienced. This can be easily tracked here through measurements at an observatory on Mauna Loa in Hawai’i. The Keeling Curve (which really appears as more of a line pointing upwards) is named after the man who started taking the measurements in 1958.
The massive spike in carbon dioxide has been observed in other forms of measurement, though Mauna Loa provides an unsettlingly transparent demonstration of what happens when a species burns up a lot of carbon that had been underground for millions of years.
How much has your lifestyle contributed to this rise in emissions? What were you likely doing when the planet passed this inauspicious milestone?
Benjamin Franklin’s phonetic alphabet (original image: omniglot)
Benjamin Franklin was many things. Politician, scientist, inventor, printer author, he was a visionary whose ideas helped shape America. But he also had some notions that, while founded on sound logic and pragmatism, seem quite bizarre in retrospect. For instance, there’s his suggestion that the turkey was a more appropriate national symbol than the eagle, which he saw as “a bird of bad moral character.” Franklin’s vision for American didn’t stop with independence and iconography. He also proposed a redesigned alphabet – a new language for a new nation.
Franklin developed his phonetic alphabet in 1768 but it wasn’t published until 1789, when Noah Webster, intrigued by Franklin’s proposal, included its description in his book Dissertations on the English Language. However, because, Webster lacked the type blocks to illustrate Franklin’s changes, the alphabet wouldn’t be seen until Franklin had new blocks cast to print the alphabet for his 1779 collection of writings, Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces. It was the ultimate test of Franklin’s scholarship and polymathy, a phonetic alphabet designed to have a “more natural Order,” than the existing system. His proposal, “A Reformed Mode of Spelling,” opens with an analysis of spoken English in the form of a table prioritizing the alphabet by sound and vocal effort. Franklin gave preference to “Sounds formed by the Breath, with none or very little help of Tongue, Teeth, and Lips; and produced chiefly in the Windpipe.”
The introductory table to Benjamin Franklin’s “A Reformed Mode of Spelling” (image: Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces)
Franklin’s analysis resulted in removing six letters from the alphabet – C, J, Q, W, X, AND Y– that were, in his view, redundant or confusing. The “hard” and “soft” sounds of a C, for example, can easily be replaced by a K and S. Franklin also limited the remaining letters to one sound, “as every letter ought to be,” including vowels. In the phonetic alphabet, “long” vowel pronunciations are achieved using double vowels. The changes weren’t all reductive. Franklin’s alphabet includes six letters of his own devise: a letter that makes a “soft O” sound as in “folly” or “ball”; one that replaces all “sh” sounds as in “ship” or “function”; an “ng” sound; two “th” substitutes; and a letter that replaces both “um” and “un” letter combinations. Franklin first used his new alphabet at length in a 1768 letter to Polly Stevenson, the conclusion of which provides an excellent, and mostly legible example, of his proposed revisions:
The end of Franklin’s letter to Stevenson. Translation: “…difficulty of learning and using it. And it would already have been such, if we had continued the Saxon spelling and writing, used by our forefathers. I am, my dear friend, yours affectionately, Ben Franklin”
Franklin was confident that his new alphabet would easier to learn and, once learned, would drastically reduce bad spelling. He believed any difficulty in implementing a new alphabet would ultimately be overcome by its logic and simplicity. However, biographer Walter Isaacson has written that the alphabet “took his passion for social improvement to radical extremes.” But in the heady days after the Revolution, a national language seemed like a natural development for a new country. Franklin’s proposal found little support, even with those to whom he was closest. He did, however, manage to convert Webster, the pioneer of spelling reform. Webster supported standardizing American spelling but, until meeting Franklin, had advocated against its simplification. After reading Franklin’s “A Reformed Mode of Spelling,” however, Webster was inspired to draft a more conservative proposal for reforming the alphabet, which didn’t depend on creating new characters. The two men supported one another’s pursuits but found little interest from others. Franklin eventually abandoned his plan, while Webster persisted, even publishing books using his new orthography. His efforts were met with resistance and ridiculed by critics as an unsightly corruption of language – critiques that were likely also applied to Franklin’s abandoned scheme.
There can be no doubt that language has influence over a country and its populace. It’s an integral part of one’s national identity. Franklin just took this to the extreme. Perhaps he viewed the alphabet in the same way he saw the turkey, as a something “courageous” and “original” to America. The phonetic alphabet would be an American original too, and a reflection of the men and women living in the new country – pragmatic, efficient, egalitarian.
It’s the same every year, after weeks of suffering from cold temperatures, icy winds and just too much snow, temperatures suddenly make a surprising jump to give Berlin a summery feel the local flora can’t live up to… So that’s why the above picture is lacking in something: leafs. The beautiful and giant chestnut trees covering the more than famous Prater Garten are still very naked and thus an odd contrast to the crowds enjoying beer in sleeveless shirts and short skirts.
Of course that’s not at all a reason to not enjoy this sudden warmth that revives the city’s spirit. And why not celebrate the (hopefully) final end of winter with a spontaneous visit of the Biergarten? To have some bratwurst and of course a beer, of which I prefer the dark ones.
Prater Garten is and will always be crowded, it’s mentioned in too many guides to not be and still has a very nice feel in these early warm days. The lines are not annoyingly long and you won’t need to squeeze yourself onto the benches.
They offer a small choice of dishes, there’s a variety of bratwurst, two soups of the day, noodle as well as couscous and potato salad. We went for the soup, a celeriac-peach soup with gorgonzola of surprisingly good quality for a Biergarten. The couscous was fine, nothing special though, but anyways, it’s about the beer and there’s plenty of that.
The latest addition is a first for the city, and possibly even the country. In the Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen, bike parking corrals, rather than parked cars, are being used to protect bike lanes. Three new corrals were just installed alongside the bike lane on Ninth Avenue in response to community requests for more bike parking.
In this video by Clarence Eckerson of Streetfilms, local safe-streets advocate Christine Berthet explains that the corrals address a need in a densely populated part of town famous for its many restaurants. These days, there are so many bikes in Hell’s Kitchen that racks on narrow sidewalks can’t handle the volume, and pedestrians were getting crowded out. A corral with enough room for 16 bicycles replaces a single car parking space.
Local restaurant managers, many of whom employ large fleets of delivery cyclists, are enthusiastic, as the video shows. "It's more beautiful, more organized," says one woman who works at a Thai place called Zoob Zib.
"This is good," adds the owner of Italian restaurant Casa di Isacco. "This is perfect for New York."
(Full disclosure: I used to work for Streetfilms’ sister publication, Streetsblog.)
“I like to wear practical and long-lasting clothes in which I can walk straight from the forest to a restaurant. My favourite material is wool. I'm hunting for good second hand woollen clothes all the time.
Old Alpine mountain climbers inspire me. You can find nice woollen clothes in Scotland, too.”
this is fucking gorgeous but i know if i ever tried it, it'd look like poop.
Blurring the lines: We like this informal two-tone wall (good for the non-perfectionists among us), spotted on the Norwegian company Lady Premium Paint & Colors blog. All that's needed: a roller, some painter's tape, and a steady hand.
Imagine your favorite book store, what would it look like? Of course it would have the variety, the well selected presentation tables with books you want to read immediately, rows and rows of interesting readables etc. Would it also have comfortable grandma-style chairs? Yes? And even more of that so everyone could start reading new found favorites immediately? Yes? And now imagine it also had a coffee bar with delicious bagels and cakes and other treats to make your stay even better? That would be the best, basically? Shakespeare & Sons has all of this, no exaggeration necessary. Welcome to bibliophile’s heaven.
In between all the English and French, used as well as new books, a small café serves bagels, cakes, teas, coffee and cake. I especially enjoyed the dark rye bagels with just the right amount of caraway, served with fresh cheese and a delicious cup of tea. Followed by a vegan chocolate-cheese-cake made with tofu. Because, reading makes you (me) hungry.
The atmosphere is what makes this book store special, the well set lighting and the great choice of books will make you stay longer than you planned. Considering they also hold events like book presentations and talks, this might become your new favorite hang-out.
eric lidji profiles brookline boulevard's reconstruction in the most recent "public notices."
The Public Notices cartoon for last week.
The newest installment is a sneaky scene from the North Side in the issue of City Paper on racks today. To see all the Public Notices in geographic terms, check out the map.
Sounds made by a little-known primate living in Ethiopia's mountain grasslands may hint at the origins of human speech. Unlike most other primates, which communicate in strings of short, relatively flat-toned syllables, geladas possess uncannily human-like vocal tempos and ...
We had three theories of what state characteristic might serve as a predictor that its senator was about to change his or her mind. The first was how Obama fared in the state last November, that there might be correlation between how Obama did electorally and the order in which senators declared support on the issue. The second was household income, that senators' shifts correlated to socioeconomics. And, finally, that the correlation was between the density of same-sex couples in a state.
Obama's margin of victory
A quick description of methodology is in order. The blue line on each chart below (pegged to the left axis) indicates (using data very helpfully compiled by the Post) the number of days between a senator's announcement of support and the first senator to make such an announcement: Barbara Boxer, in June 2006. (This isn't quite true; Ron Wyden announced in 1996, but that threw off the curve.) So the flat part at the right of the blue curve is the recent spate of announcements. We included both interactive and static versions of the charts because we wanted to include a trend line — that dashed red line in the second chart below. (For the truly curious, that line is a fifth-order polynomial.)
And so: The relationship between announcements of support and how Obama fared in the state. What we're looking for is a dashed line that clearly descends over time.
It seems clear that how Obama fared in a state is a good indicator of when a senator is likely to announce support for same-sex marriage. Which isn't a surprise, of course. Politicians are very reactive to political support. And the more political support demonstrated for a candidate that supports same-sex marriage, the more likely another candidate would be to take the same position.
If this model is correct, the next five most-likely announcements would come from:
1. Susan Collins, Maine
2. Ron Johnson, Wisconsin
3. Dean Heller, Nevada
4. Chuck Grassley, Iowa
5. Kelly Ayotte, New Hampshire
These are all Republican senators. Which isn't a big surprise; it makes sense that states that voted for Obama but have Republican senators would most likely be what's left. The four Democrats who still haven't endorsed — Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Joe Manchin of West Virginia — would be the 23rd, 25th, 38th, and 39th most likely to do so under this model.
Please note: If Heller or Grassley declares his support for gay marriage, send warm coats to Hell.
There appears to be a loose correlation between the density of same-sex couples in a state (as a percentage of all households, calculated by the Census) and how rapidly a senator will declare his or her support. This may, then, be a good test case. If one of the following five senators is next to declare an evolution, we may be on to something.
All of this data, of course, correlates to a bunch of other things, like urban density for example. Consider it more of a thought exercise than anything.
If you're curious, the Post's Sullivan made the following predictions, in order: Lisa Murkowski, Alaska; Susan Collins, Maine; Richard Burr, North Carolina; Kelly Ayotte, New Hampshire; Pat Toomey, Pennsylvania. Somehow Dean Heller didn't make the cut, but otherwise not all that different than our list.
Meanwhile, Nate Silver of 538, the man who taught us all about the supremacy of data, did his own analysis of the data. Among his conclusions:
Some senators will continue to oppose it, either because it does not yet constitute a majority position in their states (like Senator Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, they may say it should be decided at the state level), or because they oppose it on moral grounds, or because they are more concerned about a primary challenge than the general election.
Heitkamp announced her support today. Maybe there's something to this gut thing after all.
A new poll from Gallup shows that Americans’ support for physician-assisted suicide changes radically depending on whether or not “suicide” is used in the question’s wording. 
More trees on BDiF
Folkert
Sounds made by a little-known primate living in Ethiopia's mountain grasslands may hint at the origins of human speech. Unlike most other primates, which communicate in strings of short, relatively flat-toned syllables, geladas possess uncannily human-like vocal tempos and ...
