A STRONG CURRENT

How does a city work?

2011-08-10T15:55:00.006-04:00

An interesting article from Government Computer News about the use of analytic software to discover the relationships between a city's core information systems that handle the economy, housing, education, public safety. The aim is to help planners make better policy decisions. How does public transportation affect education? What impact does population density have on public health? Is there a

Peace Be Unto You, Brother Gil

2011-06-01T07:42:00.009-04:00

Poet, musician, novelist, cultural revolutionary, social activist, visionary: all pieces of the man, Gil Scott-Heron, age 62, who joined the ancestors Friday, May 27, 2011.I first learned about Gil’s death Saturday morning from a posting on a friend’s Facebook wall. Throughout the day, friends posted their favorite Gil Scott-Heron songs and commented on his musical

Let Freedom Ring and Ring and Ring

2011-02-05T21:43:00.006-05:00

So, Super Bowl XLV is set for this Sunday in Arlington, Texas, a suburb of Dallas.Two National Football League teams with storied histories – The Pittsburgh Steelers and The Green Bay Packers – will battle for the right to take home The Vince Lombardi Trophy.Many folks today might not know how much modern day sports teams in southern cities --which segregated Whites and Blacks and other people of

Innovations to make cities smarter

2009-12-24T18:17:00.003-05:00

Buildings that know when they need to be fixed before something breaks. Smart water and sewage systems that can filter and recycle water. Sensors that give fire departments details of a fire before they receive the emergency phone call.Sounds futuristic?These are some of the predictions IBM researchers say will make cities smarter over the next five years.An estimated 60 million people around

CIA invests in social media monitoring software

2009-11-02T07:27:00.005-05:00

Could your blogs and tweets eventually be monitored by the CIA? An interesting article by "Wired" magazine's Noah Shactman, U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets, reports that the CIA's investment arm, In-Q-Tel, has bought a stake in Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. Visible's technology crawls through millions of web sites,

A Time of Renewal

2009-08-28T07:04:00.008-04:00

So, I was listening to the Kojo Nnamdi show Monday on my car radio (WAMU, 88.5 FM) as he spoke with the presidents of Georgetown University and the University of Maryland in College Park about their colleges and education. Both schools are located in the metro Washington, D.C. areaC. D. “Dan” Mote, Jr., the president of UMD, described going back to school after the summer break as a time of

Agony at Gethsemene

2009-07-26T17:53:00.004-04:00

One of the sites I found especially moving during my trip through Israel was the Garden of Gethsemene, where Jesus reportedly prayed(while his disciplines slept) and was arrested. We all have to go through those dark moments of meeting self, our own Gethsemene, which is why this site, along with the Sea of Galilee, stayed with me more than some others. I have been very bad about blogging Rutrell

A Dog Named N...

2009-05-28T13:51:00.007-04:00

I was channel surfing over the Memorial Day weekend and came across a movie called The Dam Busters, a 1955 British war film set during the Second World War.Turns out the lead character’s black Labrador was named Nigger. That got my attention.The Dam Busters is based on the true story of the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron and the development of the bouncing bomb. The Squadron used the bombs, which

See You at The Top

2009-04-04T08:25:00.004-04:00

If you’ve read my profile you know that I trekked up Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania nearly two years ago.Kilimanjaro is the world’s largest free standing mountain, 5,891 meters or 19, 330 feet at its peak.And while I no longer dream that I’m actually climbing Kili – something that kept occurring weeks after the trek – I still think about that trip, our group of eight trekkers and the people I met

More Chris-Rihanna 'News'? No Thanks!

2009-03-08T12:25:00.014-04:00

Are many people really lusting after more news on the Chris Brown/Rihanna abuse case? This was the argument Harvey Levin of TMZ.com, the celebrity news and gossip website, tried to make this morning on Reliable Sources. Howard Kurtz, the host and Washington Post news media critic, posed the question of whether the elite newspaper media felt above the story, since publications like the New York

Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World

2009-03-01T22:23:00.004-05:00

Arab culture is rich and diverse.That diversity is being showcased from February 23 to March 15 in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area as the Kennedy Center presents Arabesque: Arts of the Arab World. Over three weeks, more than 800 Arab artists will perform on the Center’s stages and public spaces to showcase the diverse traditional and contemporary cultures of the 22 nations that represent

Ain't Nothing But A Man

2009-02-15T12:10:00.009-05:00

Was John Henry "Real" or "No Real"?Most Americans of my generation and older are acquainted with the legend of John Henry -- that steel drivin' man who pitted human strength against a steam drill and won. He dropped dead, though, after his victory, so the songs and story goes.I remember him, based on paintings or drawings in folklore and history books, as this massive, black man; heavy hammer

War Against Women in The Congo

2009-02-11T12:17:00.004-05:00

The decade-long war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo claims at least 45,000 lives a month, according to an article in The Guardian written last year.A brutal and vicious aspect of that war has been the violence against women. During the Monday, Feb. 9, 2009 broadcast of Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Playwright, V-Day Founder Eve Ensler and Congolese Gynecologist Dr. Denis Mukwege

Billy Elliot: Good In Whatever Country You See It

2009-02-08T14:33:00.009-05:00

Back in 2007, when I attended a West End performance of Billy Elliot the Musical, a woman sitting next to meet at The Victoria asked whether Americans would appreciate the British humor and context of the musical when it arrived in the states. I indicated my appreciation, but I was an American in London, which would have suggested some brush with British culture. She raised a good question,

Meeting Across the River

2009-02-04T16:33:00.004-05:00

The half-time Super Bowl performance by Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band this past Sunday triggered memories of my first musical encounter with the Boss. I was a freshman at a small, liberal arts college in Connecticut during the fall of 1975 and my roommate borrowed this album – Born to Run -- from a friend. I recall the picture of Springsteen, guitar in hand, leaning on the back of his

Addendum: No Quick-Fix Models Out There

2009-01-30T22:46:00.006-05:00

This little annoucement that employees of The Day, in New London, CT., will take a week furlough with no pay to deal with a revenue problem is a reminder that newspapers owned through various nonprofit arrangements or trusts ultimately face many of the same problems as for-profit newspapers. There just aren't any quick-fix business models for what is ailing the industry, though the attempts to at

When Giving Up Failing Business Models Isn't Easy

2009-01-30T11:57:00.011-05:00

A New York Times article on the vulnerability of the billable hour, which is how lawyers price their services, got me thinking about the search for new business models in the news industry(though one could probably fill in the blank with any number of industries). As the NYT article notes, the billable hour, which clients have often felt worked against their interests, is how lawyers assign value

Reflections on Soaring with Fidel

2009-01-25T18:35:00.005-05:00

I never thought that I could get engrossed in a book on bird migration. After reading an article about David Gessner in The Writer’s Chronicle on a long train ride from Hartford, CT to Washington, D.C. last year, my interest was piqued enough to buy his book, Soaring with Fidel. An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond (Beacon Press, 2007).As Gessner states in his introduction, the book

Lesson of CNN's 3D Experiment: Multiperspectives are The Moment

2009-01-21T11:25:00.006-05:00

Although I embraced the web much earlier than many others with a print background, I am still suspicious of the rush to use new technologies to do journalism. Such efforts often don't result in better and deeper information; you need ever-developing thinking, research, and writing skills for that. Expensive innovations like CNN's hologram reporter, which debuted on Election night, seemed awfully

What Would You Have Done?

2009-01-19T20:57:00.007-05:00

For me, a film is successful when it leaves its viewers still thinking and talking about it the next day. Of course, this is a general statement; I am sure there are many really bad films that spark conversation for days on end. The Reader grabs the mind as it works its way through the story and leaves viewers asking one another questions about moral conscience and what any of us might have done

Welcome to Bizarro World:Fan Mail from Jail

2009-01-16T13:28:00.005-05:00

I got a letter from a convicted murder serving life in Oklahoma. The envelope was stamped on the back with official notice that the letter was from an inmate--a warning before I crossed the path of no return and opened it. Apparently, the inmate read an article on the science of media bias that I wrote for Scientific American. Not sure if he read it in print or online. (Could he have a

A Deafening Silence

2009-01-13T05:18:00.014-05:00

On Saturday, January 10, I attended the “Let Gaza Live” protest rally in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House and a few blocks south of the Hay-Adams Hotel where President-elect Barack Obama and his family are staying until they move into the Blair House and then onto the White House next week.The rally and march, sponsored by ANSWER Coalition, Muslim American Society Freedom,

Black Matriarchs (Sassy, of course) and the New York Times

2009-01-11T11:36:00.007-05:00

Matriarch, of course, is an innocent enough word, generally meaning the elder female head of an extended family. That word has a lot of baggage in American culture, however. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's infamous report, which spoke of black matriarchs emasculating black men, is one of the more vivid examples of the problem with the word. It kind of makes one wonder where someone with

Do ABC and BBC Share a Similar Lens on Iraq?

2009-01-08T12:15:00.004-05:00

This plan by ABC to get its Iraq coverage from BBC makes me wonder whether the two will have disagreements over what should be on the air. Granted, the news out of Iraq right now isn't of the shock and awe sort, and ABC has a relationship with BBC that goes back to 1994, according to the The Hollywood Reporter article. Yet, although academic studies have found US and UK media coverage of the war

At Some Point, Readers Got Smarter Than Their Newspapers

2009-01-07T11:08:00.006-05:00

Others will have more useful economic insight to add after reading this Atlantic piece on imagining a world without the New York Times. Sadly, it isn't hard to imagine, or get used to. I say this as someone who has the NYT delivered each day and assigns it in the classroom. Yet I've long tired of Sunday Styles and other features that spin the world in the image of New York elites. Of course, it's

Professional Journos Need Training, Too

2008-12-31T00:47:00.032-05:00

They're not fulltime journalists yet, but my journalism students have the same reservations as professionals when it comes to citizen journalism. For a journalism history assignment at the end of this past semester, I had the students claim a spot on a timeline spanning the next 10-12 years and write a short essay about a future development, drawing on some of the journalism history we’d studied