COMMUNITY NOTIFICATION

Waterplace Park Safety Concerns

The Brown University Department of Public Safety is alerting the University Community of a robbery of a RISD student in Waterplace Park on the bridge near the GTECH Building on Monday, March 17th at approximately 5:45 p. m.

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Due to a recent rise in criminal and violent activity in the Waterplace Park area, the Brown University Department of Public Safety is advising students to use caution in this area. Students visiting the Providence Place Mall should access the mall via the Skybridge from the Westin Hotel.

This sucks. It’s not even fully dark by 5:45 pm these days. Waterplace Park is one of my favorite parts of downtown Providence. I always walk to the mall because it’s so much nicer than walking along the road where they is barely any sidewalk. Some devleopment company is in the process of building some fancy condos inside the part right along the river. Maybe they could pay for better lighting under the bridges. And maybe the Providence police could spend more time patrolling downtown and Waterplace Park and less time giving people tickets for parking on the street overnight.

tags: brown, news

Annapolis Talks Prompt Much Doubt, A Few Jokes, in Mideast:

In cafes and blogs in the Arab world, the Annapolis conference prompted little more than wisecracks. Commentators made much of a linguistic coincidence: In Arabic, “ana polis” means “I am the police.”

tags: news, webloggish

Does Stephen Colbert’s run for president violate election law?:

Yes. The Federal Election Commission prohibits corporations from making “any contribution or expenditure in connection with a federal election.” A “contribution” includes “anything of value,” including airtime. Thus each time Colbert promotes his candidacy on The Colbert Report, he’ll be accepting an illegal “in kind” contribution from Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom. The FEC does exempt news programs (including satires like the Report) from the “in kind” airtime ban, but not if a political party, political committee, or candidate (like Colbert) controls the show’s content.

Surely this was anticipated by Comedy Central/Viacom’s legal team before it went through? I wonder.

tags: news, politics, tv

Compete for capital:

There is no efficient capital market to reward nonprofit performance in part because there are no agreed-upon performance metrics by which to determine winners. Private investors look to profitability, return, and growth; philanthropists and the programs they support don’t share metrics to judge who is outdoing whom.

Enter fantasy sports—a billion-dollar market in which players operate leagues whose entrants win or lose based on agreed-upon metrics. The players agree in advance on which metrics to use. For example, fantasy baseball looks to hits, runs batted in, home runs, and stolen bases to rate hitters, and wins, saves, earned run average, and strikeouts to rate pitchers. At the end of each season, more money goes to the players whose fantasy picks have outperformed the others.

tags: news, pensieve, webloggish

Having discovered the C-SPAN Video Library this morning, I came across this Q&A with Michelle Rhee, the new Chancellor of the DC Public School system. She sounds competent and I am of excited to see what she will accomplish. Here is some background on her from the New York Times.

Ms. Rhee, 37, a Korean-American, will be the first schools chief in 40 years who is not black. In Washington, 95 percent of the district’s public school students are black.

And Ms. Rhee has never run a school or a school system before. Not even a little one.

But she seems undaunted by the criticism and the challenges ahead, pointing out that through the teacher project, she has volumes of experience with many largely minority, urban systems. Sitting down recently with parents and community leaders, Ms. Rhee recalled, she looked around the room and said: “I know what you’re all thinking. What’s this Korean lady doing here?”

“How did you know?” blurted out a woman in the front row, as the room broke out in laughter.

“That’s O.K.,” Ms. Rhee answered. “We can get it out of the way now.”

In the interview, she said she has found that racial differences dissipate as parents understand her motivation. “I have never met a single parent who did not want the same things for their kids that I want for their kids,” she said.

tags: dc, news

Richard Rorty, 75; Leading US Pragmatist Philosopher:

An heir to William James and John Dewey, Dr. Rorty advocated a philosophy known as pragmatism, which shunned what he considered a fruitless search to answer unknowable questions: What is the meaning of life? Do other people exist? He had rejected the field of analytic philosophy on the ground that it attempts to address those questions, which he largely considered a waste of time, and had created something akin to a hunt for timeless truths, another idea he strongly criticized.

His dismissal of analytic philosophy led some of his harshest critics, including Bernard Williams of Oxford University, to write that Dr. Rorty was a relativist who believed truth was dispensable. Dr. Rorty’s supporters saw an important distinction: that Dr. Rorty was carrying on the pragmatic tradition of seeing truth as something created by humans in their struggle to cope with the world around them and not simply eternal truths suddenly found by them.

Michael Williams, philosophy department chairman at Johns Hopkins University, said Dr. Rorty, one of his mentors, “taught the lesson there are no fixed and permanent foundations for anything, that anything could be changed. Where some see this as cause for despair, he saw this as cause for hope because it meant we could always do better. . . . He reveled in contingency,” what happens as a result of human progress.

Williams added: “Instead of trying to define the essence of human nature, Rorty thought we should creatively think up new possibilities for ourselves — what to be, how to live. He said we are not hostage to how things are. He spoke of pragmatism as a future-oriented philosophy.”

tags: news, philosophy