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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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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”

On Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, firing from a 28-story clock tower on the University of Texas campus, killed 15 people and wounded dozens of others before being killed by the Austin police.

The worst mass shooting of any kind in the country was on Oct. 16, 1991, in Killeen, Texas, when a man smashed his pickup truck into a restaurant, stepped out, and shot and killed 22 people before killing himself.

Last October, a 32-year-old man entered a one-room Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and shot 10 schoolgirls, then killed himself. Five of the girls died.

The Virginia shooting also surpassed the worst shootings of recent years in Europe. In April 2002, 18 people, including 14 teachers, died in Erfurt, Germany, when an expelled former student went on a shooting rampage. That was the worst such shooting in Europe since 1996, when a gunman in Dunblane, Scotland, killed 16 students, a teacher and then himself.

Although it was a far different sort of incident, more than 340 people were killed in September 2004 at a school in Beslan, Russia, in a confrontation between Chechen hostage-takers and Russian security forces.

I don’t remember hearing anything about the Erfurt or Dunblane incidents, although I was quite young when the latter occurred. I also was not aware of the 1991 and 1966 American incidents.

An air-conditioning unit on top of a 45-story office building in Chicago’s West Loop caught fire today, sending black smoke into the sky and prompting workers to stream out of the structure.

But the blaze never spread to the interior of the building, no official evacuation order was issued and no serious injuries were reported, authorities said.

Peter and I saw the smoke coming out of this building while we were riding the El downtown. It was a dramatic image. I had my camera but I didn’t think to take a photo. Losing my photographer instincts, no doubt.

The bill seeks to increase the House permanently to 437 seats, from 435. In a bipartisan compromise, one seat would go to the overwhelmingly Democratic District, which has a nonvoting delegate in the House. The other would go to the next state in line to pick up a seat based on the 2000 Census: Utah, which leans Republican. Several Republican House members assailed the bill this week, noting that the Constitution reserves representation for residents of states, not districts. Supporters countered with a section of the Constitution known as the “District Clause,” which gives Congress sweeping powers over the city. Legal scholars have disagreed over who is right.

“Rumsfeld’s out,” he said to five marines sprawled with rifles on the cold floor.

Lance Cpl. James L. Davis Jr. looked up from his cigarette. “Who’s Rumsfeld?” he asked.

If history is any guide, many of the young men who endure the severest hardships and assume the greatest risks in the war in Iraq will become interested in politics and politicians later, when they are older and look back on their combat tours.

But not yet. Marine infantry units have traditionally been nonpolitical, to the point of stubbornly embracing a peculiar detachment from policy currents at home. It is a pillar of the corps’ martial culture: those with the most at stake are among the least involved in the decisions that send them where they go.

Mr. Rumsfeld may have become one of the war’s most polarizing figures at home. But among these young marines slogging through the war in Anbar Province, he appeared to mean almost nothing. If he was another casualty, they had seen worse.