Polis Under Construction

Date: September 23, 2008
Place: Bus to UTSA, after work

This was a good day,  In some ways it was a culmination of a great many days not directly focused on helping people.  It was also a little chaotic, unplanned.  In a way those situations seem to fit my mind; the uncertainty makes reacting a bigger problem and holds my attention longer.

We got our uniforms today.  I’m now sitting on the bus with a backpack stuffed to the seams, a trashbag with a coat and workboots, the bag I brought to work today, and a sweatshirt not really required in San Antonio at this hour.  Riding a bike with all of this is an interesting challenge.

Over the rest of the week we’ll be introducing ourselves to the city.  Tomorrow there wil be a lunch presentation to the Rotary Club, on Friday we have a ceremony at City Council chambers, and on Saturday we’ll be helping to run a number of service projects across the city.  Next week we’ll dive into KIPP for our first full week, with a service lesson for ~80 7th graders on Saturday.  I’m looking forward to it.

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And a little bit of cynicism disappears.

Date: Monday September 22, 2008
Place: 11 PM, home

Over the nest 10 months, I’ve promised to complete over 1700 hours of community service through a program called City Year.  I’ll be working in a local charter school designed to be a college preparatory middle school.  It’s called KIPP Aspire Academy; it’s overwhelmingly Hispanic, poor (92% or so qualify for free or reduced lunch), and intriguingly successful.

I’ll be mentoring, tutoring, running electives, and creating lesson plans along with my team of 3 others, plus a team leader.

Since the 1st, I’ve been training, team-building, learning about the school, and getting to know my teammates.  There are a little over 30 of us all together, from all over the nation, between 17 and 24.

In addition there are five team leaders, people our age who’ve gone through the program before or simply have experience with this kind of work.  There are also 5 staff members, older but mainly in their late 20’s, overseeing everything.

Date: Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Place: 820 AM, McDonalds across from City Year

I’ve been training and doing a few small things for the past few weeks, and I find myself getting more tired, hungry, and cranky.  I don’t think it’s purely the unaccustomed work hours — the long days.

First, I feel I have little in common with most of my corps members.  Agewise I’m more on par with the team leaders, and I’m more interested in the work of the staff.  After a few days of poring through City Year finances and funding methods in spare moments, there haven’t been many intriguing opportunities.

Second, I’ll be working at a school where much of the team questions whether they really need us.  To all appearances, KIPP Academy is extraordinarily successful, taking disadvantaged and at risk kids and setting them on a path for college and elite preparatory schools when some of them had never heard of college before arrival.  This may change as the year progresses and I teach and get to know mentees.

For now, I’m feeling useless, surrounded by people substantially unlike me, working on problems I feel just a little bit uninteresting.

For the last two months, and until June 2009, I’ll be spending my weeks mentoring and tutoring middle schoolers, aiding and running service projects throughout San Antonio, and learning how to be a leader.

I’m part of a program called City Year, a national service organisation for young people between 17 and 24.  They dedicate a year to service in one of the 18 sites across the US (plus one in South Africa).

The days since September have been incredible, and I’ve been trying to document them as best I can.  This is an experience that changes you, as I’ve already seen in the two months so far.  I want to be able to look back afterwards and see how it has done so, and share that process with others.  Some of these will have incorrect information or points of view that I now disagree with, and I’ll still considering how to deal with it.  I’d like to leave much of it as it was written, reflecting how I thought at the time.  At the same time, I’ll try to note these errors or changes when they occur.

It should be noted, of course, that everything I write here is my own opinion, not that of City Year.  I’d like to think that’s part of the benefit — my experience, as it happens, without the changing perceptions of hindsight.

I have a stack of journal entries from the last few weeks, waiting to be posted.  This first one is undated, written at the beginning of one of the first days.

Date: Undated, written on the back of a flyer from the first day.

As I write this, I’m beginning a 40 minute bus ride early in the morning.  The sun has just barely begin to rise, and I’ll be taking this same ride every weekday for the next 10 months.  I’ve never been a big fan of sunrises, and I’m much more likely to see them from the other side of the clock.

The point of these predawn 40 minute rides is a program called City Year.  It’s a volunteer program that takes young adults from 17-24 and gives them a chance to work in one of 7(?) (actually, 19) sites across the US and one in South Africa.

They work on literacy in elementary schools, mentoring and homework help in middle and high schools, spend time on a long list of community development projects, and hopefully have some fun doing it.

Of course, fun in this case also involves getting up before dawn for nearly a year of ten hour workdays.  That’s part of the challenge, though, and it’s nearly as attractive as having some small impact on a community or school.

The next year should be interesting.

A few hours ago, Obama’s campaign manager sent out an email suggesting the campaign was close to announcing a running mate, and inviting their entire email list to be notified when this is announced.

You can read the letter here.

The notification part is what interests me.  They obviously want everyone to know about the decision, without having to wait for the news to filter through the press and the hardcore “I check his site every day” supporters, perhaps hoping for yet another burst of donor support.  They even go to the extent of offering an instant text message update.

That in itself raises interesting possibilities.  Obama’s campaign has built itself up through the use of email lists meticulously collected at rallies from supporters who signed up for more information.  These lists are refined and correlated with users who visit the site, donate, and volunteer.  Reportedly, they now boast one of the best datasets on Democratic supporters that exists, data that can be used to aid other campaigns.

Now, they’re going to have millions of phone numbers.  Millions of cell phone numbers possessed by those young people most difficult to target in polling, least likely to have a land line, and most likely to support Obama.

Of course, the backlash to a campaign that did anything untoward with this information would be horrendous.  But since 7:17 PM, the Obama campaign has been compiling what may become one of the most valuable lists in politics.

Talkorgins.org, U. of Berkeley, and the National Academy of Sciences has put together what they title “A Survey of Public Understanding of Evolution.”  It’s quick, easy, and offers the possibilty of a look at the data when it’s all wrapped up.  Go to it.

I’ve noticed murmurs for a while that the major problem faced was public perception/inaccurate conceptions of evolution; this looks to be the newest way to respond.

I’ve been blogging, off and on, for a while now.  I enjoy it a lot; it’s great to put words out there, find little pieces of information, and watch people flock to them.  There’s a reason I keep coming back.  Of course, there’s a reason I keep leaving as well.

I’ve tried several times.  Originally, I treated it as an anonymous, personal space.  I mixed anecdotes and subtle references to offline friends with generic political opinion.  It was fun, but it didn’t really keep me interested.  It takes a certain level of arrogance to think that others want to know your minutiae, and political opinion is easy to find online.

So I tried again.  I’m fascinated by politics, especially on a macro level, and the interactions it has with society.  I stripped out a lot of personal navel gazing and dug for stories that seemed to receive less attention, looking for patterns.  The series of public protests that occurred in the Ukraine, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, and Burma were remarkable to me, especially for their limited successes in Ukraine, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, and recently Nepal.

But massive public participations heralding a possible rejuvenation of democracy only happen so often.  If 2-3 posts are going up every day it’s too easy to devolve into the same old echo chamber much of the blogging community seems to be.  There are excellent blogs, and I enjoy reading several regularly.  But, it seems that too often a blog becomes little more than a news aggregator; collecting and distributing bits on cute animals, technology news, and (US) politics with personal opinions attached.

That, I think, is what ended my blogging in the past.  We already have news aggregators, better ones than a one man blog could ever be.  And I have an inherent distrust of the packaging of opinion as a unique product.  If that is all that a blog is adding to a story it ripped from the New York Times (while criticising the media for hiding the story), I don’t see why I shouldn’t go there instead, unless the blogger adds some special experience or perspective.  If I’d rather read a primary source, how can I expect readers to come to me?

For the most part, the blogging community, though, apart from a few high profile writers, does little more than pass around stories grabbed from someone else.  There is a reason that people like Lessig, Doctorow, Mankiw, Scoble, and Drudge have the success they do.  They either have the experience to provide perspective or information that can’t easily be found elsewhere.  A blogging community that revolves around a few high profile sources does not live up to its claims that it democratizes media.  Access is certainly far better when anyone can get online and publish, but that benefit is lost if everyone is posting the same thing.

This isn’t the way it should be. Read the rest of this entry »

Holy.. Clinton must be feeling desperate. She told Tim Russert Sunday that if elected, she would begin withdrawing troops within 60 days– 1-2 brigades per month.

Edited: Also, Tim Russert is actually acting like a journalist. He’s dragged up (clips from) Clinton and Obama’s speeches on the actual war resolution.

Again: Now he’s asking her about her failure to read the NIE estimate on Iraq.  She’s saying there were so many other briefings it didn’t matter much.

AIDG blog today has a short link to SciAm’s story on solar energy in the US.

In an extensive article, the writers argue that in 40 years, solar energy could provide more than half of needed US electricity.  But, it’s not without cost.

To provide electricity at six cents per kWh by 2020, cadmium telluride modules would have to convert electricity with 14 percent efficiency, and systems would have to be installed at $1.20 per watt of capacity. Current modules have 10 percent efficiency and an installed system cost of about $4 per watt. Progress is clearly needed, but the technology is advancing quickly; commercial efficiencies have risen from 9 to 10 percent in the past 12 months.

They suggest dedicating over 30.000 square miles of land to solar cells, an area they say is “less than that needed for a coal-powered plant when factoring in land for coal mining.”  Energy would be stored during night and cloudy days by pressurizing air or using the molten salt that Solar Reserve is pioneering.

However, their plan calls for significant subsidies, over 400 billion through 2050.

Al Qaida is as media savy as ever.

Al-Qaida video messages of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri can now be downloaded to cell phones, the terror network announced as part of its attempts to extend its influence.

Of course, part of the reason may be decreasing sympathetic coverage elsewhere. Al Jazeera has been partially muzzled by a deal between the Qatar and the Saudis.

The new policy is the latest chapter in a gradual domestication of Al Jazeera, once reviled by American officials as little more than a terrorist propaganda outlet. Al Jazeera’s broadcasts no longer routinely refer to Iraqi insurgents as the “resistance,” or victims of American firepower as “martyrs.”