thisishappening

Check out this new tool--thisishappening--to post and to get information about events around Pittsburgh.

KDKA: Jon Delano

I was out of town for several days, on a trip to Lansing, Michigan (yes, I'll be updating my "states visited" map). Back in town, two interesting political items dominate the news: one the demographics of the fiscal oversight committee appointed to supervise the city, the second the provocative idea that the city and county might actually merge.

I don't have a dog in either fight; this item is about something related: For insight into both, I rely on local political analyst Jon Delano. I'm fortunate to have John as a neighbor and an information source, and Carnegie Mellon is fortunate to have him as an adjunct faculty member.

Welcome to 16:62 Design Zone

Thanks to Chris McGowan's letter to the P-G last weekend, I can confirm that the Strip is far from dead. Check out the 16:62 Design Zone and Neighbors in the Strip.

Foreign Policy

This has nothing to do with Pittsburgh, but here's a link to a great feature in the current New Yorker about American foreign policy, by George Packer.

By any measure, a great city

The new rabbi in town finds the bandwagon and climbs on right away! Brilliant!

Proposals abound for Fifth and Forbes

Catching up from last week: Here's a group of ideas from locals about what do with the Fifth and Forbes corridor. Is there anything new here?

Downtown has to be a regional resource. Not a place primarily to serve people who (we hope someday will) live there. Not a place primarily to serve low income folks. It can't be a Disney-ish preserved "Main Street" of historical buildings. And though the "redevelopment" label has clearly damaged property owners' incentives to invest there, we can't just remove the label and stand back and let the market take over. Downtown has to become a place where people--from all over the area--want to go, and want to stay, because they don't or can't get in their towns or neighborhoods whatever it is that Downtown offers.

Instead of asking locals for their opinions, the P-G (or someone else) should talk to urban planners, developers, community activists, preservationists--in other cities. I was in Providence last year. There's a city with a downtown that's come back from the dead. How did they deal with similar problems? Is the new downtown a success? Not?

What is a TRUE Pittsburgher?

Lenn thinks he knows.
A true Pittsburgher of the 21st century is . . .
1. Someone who does NOT say "the car needs fixed," or "sammich," or "dahntahn."
2. Someone who doesn't care if you were born in Pittsburgh.
Add your definitions to the Comments.

Pittsburgh's Best Spaces

Pittsburgh's great buildings, both old (the Allegheny County Courthouse) and new (the Alcoa HQ, the Convention Center), are pretty well-known, even to newcomers. But what about Pittsburgh's great indoor spaces? Use the comments box to nominate your favorite. Here are a few obvious ones to start off with: Heinz Chapel at Pitt. The Grand Concourse in the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie RR Terminal. Heinz Hall.
What am I missing?

Pittsburgh Ranked as America's 'Greenest' City

We've got great architecture, and great green architecture.

The Daily Bob and Copyright Law

As a result of a little surfing this morning, I threw together this page about a very cool graphic artist, his son, who appears to be a student at Carnegie Mellon and who has a small software company in Oakland, and copyright law as applied to the Internet.

The page prompts the following question: The "C" inside a circle announces copyright protection. "R" inside a circle announces a federal trademark registration. We have other symbols and marks for protecting other sorts of intellectual property rights, including the Creative Commons badge -- . The Creative Commons project also offers a Dedicated to the Public Domain badge -- . Why don't we have a "Fair User" badge or mark?

More on Mr. and Mrs.

The "Comments" facility that I've added doesn't allow for long comments. Here's a follow up on the "Mr. and Mrs." thing below. Requiring kids to use formal address all the time so that they "respect" their elders is an example of "the authority of the old," a social/cultural structure that is consciously designed to keep "the new" and "the young" in their place. (I'm hardly breaking new ground here; sociologists and anthropologists have been studying the uses of language to exercise power for decades.) There's nothing automatically wrong with of authority based on age (for example, it describes the legal system to a "t"), but people have to be aware of when it's being used, and why, and (especially) what its consequences are.

There's an interesting connection here between how we behave at an individual level and how we behave socially. Suggesting that "Mr. and Mrs." is overdone at an individual level is similar to suggesting that "the authority of the old" is overdone at the community level.

When a community uses "the authority of the old"--say, the community that is Pittsburgh relies on it (as in, "We've always done it that way," or "We need to recapture the great way that things used to be done around here," or "We need to save the City's Democratic base")--then it interferes with change, and growth, and the potential for good things. I suspect that this is actually what Richard Florida may be getting at with The Rise of the Creative Class. If you look at especially interesting, growth-oriented communities, you see places that keep "the authority of the old" at a safe distance.

(If that means that I don't get a certain amount of "respect" from young 'uns who call me by my first name, my ego can handle that.)

Paul's CDs

Rich sez: THE place to buy recorded music is PAUL'S CDs, in Bloomfield (4526 Liberty Ave.; 412.621.3256). I couldn't find a website for Paul's, but while I was looking, I found the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance.

UPDATE: A commenter notes that Paul's can be found online here. Thanks!

Too Many 22-year-olds in Pittsburgh?

More on the myth of Pittsburgh's alleged "brain drain": Chris Briem pointed me to this table, which shows that Pittsburgh is the fourth-ranked city nationwide for the percentage of its population ages 25-34 with graduate or professional degrees.

Pittsburgh and the International Federation of Planets

Just one more thing (about the "creative class" thesis). I'm also reminded of a point made some time back by a friend of mine (Julie) about an interesting corollary to the Star Trek thesis (that it's wonderful and civilizing boldly to go where no one has gone before). On the television shows and in the films, we see the crew of the Enterprise, diverse and accepting and (mostly) harmonious. They're the "creative class" that inspires us (or at least that inspires the fans of the series). What we don't see are all of the people who aren't flying around in starships, the people who are working for a living on the planet(s) below, creating the wealth that produces the ships and the uniforms (and the weapons) and all of the resources that Kirk and Picard and Janeway, etc. rely on. That's a creative class, too, right?

"Mr." and "Mrs." in Pittsburgh

Posting about "creative" people reminds me of a topic that's bugged me ever since I moved to Pittsburgh. There are a lot of adults around the region who insist that children address them (and that their children address others) as "Mr." and "Mrs." so-and-so. That's certainly their right, but it's always made me uncomfortable. My kids were born in Northern California into a community that encouraged everyone to address each other by their first names. ("Encouraged" is perhaps too strong a word; it was simply assumed by everyone that first names were OK.) Over the last few years in Pittsburgh, we've agreed with some of our better friends that their kids and our kids could address the adults by their first names. Some of the kids are thrilled and run with this. It makes others uncomfortable, and they revert to the formality.

Why does the "creativity" post remind me of this? Because on the whole, the kids who run with the first-name thing, and are truly comfortable with it, are the most interesting kids I know, and the ones I like to hang around with.

Florida and Creativity

I feel an obligation to blog something about CMU professor Richard Florida and his book, The Rise of the Creative Class, given the publicity around his theory of a "creative class" and what that "means" to emerging cities--such as Pittsburgh.

I haven't read the book, and I have no particular desire to, although it may become an obligatory read--sort of like Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities back in the late 1980s. Florida's thesis apparently is that there is a "creative class" that is chiefly responsible for the creative and innovative economic activity that we especially value today.

As someone who teaches copyright and patent law for a living, I'm all for creativity. I'm skeptical of the thesis, however. First, I'm skeptical of big structural theories that explain everything. Second, I'm skeptical of theories that assume that there are some people in this country (or anywhere) who are "creative" (or "innovative")--and that most other people are not. My intuition is the reverse. Given the right environment and resources, almost everyone is "creative" and "innovative" in a way that society should (and does) value. The hard work, then, isn't finding and supporting the "creators" or the "creative class," but building contexts and environments that support the creativity and innovation that's waiting to happen. (For more on this theme, look up a recent book edited by Keith Sawyer, titled Creativity and Development.)

Third, I'm skeptical because I'm inclined to credit a recent comment on the book at Amazon.com by Douglas Rae, one of my long-ago political science professors and a person with unimpeachable credentials on many topics, including urban (re)development and social history. Professor Rae calls Richard Florida's theory "imaginary history" and "astonishingly uninformed about American history."

The Pittsburgh Flag

Christian Manders has a great idea: The City of Pittsburgh should make a much bigger public deal of its cool flag. Here's the image:

A Tech-Oriented, Diverse Community

The writer of this great piece about encouraging local law firms to hire non-white lawyers buried the lead at the end of the story.

Here's the quote that caught my eye:

"'Pittsburgh has an image around the nation as a blue-collar town, but it's not," Cottle [Eric Cottle, an African-American lawyer at Kirkpatrick and Lockhart, and a Duquesne grad] said. "It's high-tech and starting to become more diverse. But that image is not being portrayed nationally.'''

Pittsburgh College Students Should Go Away

More hand-wringing about the fact that students who go to college around Pittsburgh don't stay in the region after they graduate. Unlike some writers who worry about keeping Pittsburgh kids at home, John Craig of the P-G wants to see Pittsburgh universities attract more students from around the world, and get those graduates to stay here. I think that wherever our students come from (and especially if they come from Pittsburgh), it's good that they go away. They'll come back, or some large number of them will, and whether they come back or not, they'll be more interesting and productive members of their communities after they've seen something of the world. The ones who study here and settle elsewhere can be ambassadors for the region and for our schools. (One of my very best law students at Pitt took a job with a top law firm in Washington DC three years ago. I'm hoping he makes partner someday: it makes our law school look good.) Pittsburgh doesn't need more 22-year-old college grads (or 27-year-old grad students) looking for jobs here. Pittsburgh needs more 32-year-old people from all over the world, with experience in management, looking to start companies here and create jobs.

More on Atom

Chas points out that BloggerPro supports RSS. But the standard (free) version of Blogger doesn't; it only supports Atom. Blogger appears to regard RSS as a "legacy" standard and will be pushing users to use Atom.

Here's succinct summary of the background to RSS v. Atom.

States I've Visited

Create your own visited states map here.

Pittsburgh Entrepreneurship and Virtual Reality

I had planned to plug another friend and blog a note about entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh when the Post-Gazette beat me to it. This is a nice little piece with a lousy photo about an intriguing application of "virtual reality" technology (the legal and policy implications of which are just starting to get broader attention). The founder of this little company is a "serial entrepreneur" and native Pittsburgher named R.F. Culbertson. The phenomenon that he represents is well-known in tech-hungry places like Palo Alto and Boston. We need more of it in Pittsburgh.

Atom v. RSS: A Technical and Public Policy Note

I just added a content syndication feature to this blog, via the little "Atom Feed" button over to the left. It's an "Atom" feed, not an RSS feed, for the simple reason that the blog is hosted on Blogger's free service, and Atom is the syndication format that Blogger has decided to support. (Up to now, Blogger has supported RSS for users of its paid BloggerPro service, and apparently it will continue to do so. At least for now.)

I point this out because RSS is the established weblog syndication standard. Atom is a brand new alternative. I'm not a captive user; it would be relatively easy for me to move the blog to a server and implement an RSS feed. But I'm lazy and cheap, so I stay here and use Atom. If there are a lot of other folks out there like me, who migrate to Atom initially and largely because of its connection to Blogger, we may see some interesting technical and economic changes around the Internet, some technical, and some economic.

There's a fair amount of debate going on within the technical (non-user) blog community over two aspects of Atom:

One (technical) debate concerns the decision by some aggregator developers not to parse Atom feeds that are not "well-formed"--a decision that allegedly violates an early tenet of Internet architecture sometimes called "Postel's Law" and still observed throughout most of the Internet's technical universe: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." Don't punish users for technical screwups deeper in the network. It's better that the network run at all, rather than it run perfectly or shut down. A move to technical standards that reward perfect compliance may disrupt network functionality in unexpected ways--and may signal a move toward recapture of the Internet by those savvy enough to understand how it all works.

A second (economic) debate involves the fact that Blogger itself has decided to support Atom, and not RSS. Blogger is owned by Google, and Google is the next big thing on the Internet. There are some who suggest that if Microsoft threw its weight behind a technical standard like Google has now thrown its weight behind Atom, there would be hell to pay. We'll see. Microsoft has been supporting RSS, so there are interesting questions here, at both technical and policy levels. This strikes me as an aggressive move by Google, and it raises a host of questions. Can Google put substance behind the swagger, or is this posturing to try to head off (or build value in anticipation of) an MS takeover of the company and/or the search market? If weblogs are the next "killer app," and Google is making a play for control of the market, what does that mean for the ongoing brou-ha-ha (as well as a decade-plus worth of public and private litigation) over Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior? Is Google setting itself up for the same treatment? Or were we premature in condemning Microsoft, before giving the market (fast-changing though it was) a chance to catch up? Maybe the market is catching up, after all. Is there room for more than one standard here? Or have we been wrongly worrying about extension of the OS monopoly (Microsoft), when we should have been worrying about extension of a middleware monopoly (Google)? (Irony alert: Netscape was simply ahead of its time!) Will users care? And should they?

Support Your Local Music Store

Pittsburgh as a whole tends to be pretty impressed by big national retailers and underimpressed by local entrepreneurs. That's backward. Check out a couple of stores in the South Hills that deserve your support: Empire Music in Mt. Lebanon and Fleet Feet in Bethel Park.

A Model Neighborhood?

A well-deserved bit of publicity for Highland Park.

More on Downtown

Brian Purvis wants to know what's up with Downtown. The mayor's latest redevelopment plan is in the tank, and it may be time, finally, for the City (formally speaking) to throw in the towel. The only plan that ever made sense was one that included Nordstrom, a store that creates its own weather. (A thought: with Lord & Taylor on the way out of town, wouldn't the former Mellon Bank HQ be perfect for the Seattle-based retailer? Would Nordstrom have the savvy and the cash to restore the building's former glory?)

As for the Fifth and Forbes corridor, maybe it really is time for the City just to get out of the way, remove the cloud of redevelopment that hangs over the area, and encourage existing building owners and tenants to rebuild the area. There isn't an invisible hand to guide the process; these people will need help. The History and Landmarks Foundation should be willing to contribute time (and money?) to the process.

No Whining

Rosebud closed last week. Is the Strip dead? Wrong question. If it's dead, it may come back. Or not. But the music hasn't died. If Rosebud's fans want live music in Pittsburgh, they'll figure out a way to make it happen. Pittsburgh has a vibrant live music and theater scene featuring exceptional local artists. Why don't more people know about it? Why aren't out-of-towners making pilgrimages to see art and culture in Pittsburgh? The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust has the high end nailed down (go see our fabulous Symphony!), but it's the middle and low-ends--everyday art--that needs promoting. (Kudos to the Trust for supporting Raul Malo's fabulous band The Mavericks on March 9.)

The Greater Pittsburgh Arts Alliance and ProArts can't run every venue or every show, but they can get out in front of the arts scene. Why doesn't Pittsburgh have a national reputation as a fabulous arts town? It should.

Ole, Ole, Ole, Ole

The February 5 issue of the City Paper includes a promising column by Marty Levine touting the arrival in Pittsburgh of Izabara Salazar, a new marketing exec with Red Guitar Media charged with drawing out the region's Latino community. Anything that brings out a greater public Latino presence in Pittsburgh has to be a good thing. I want my Telemundo!

Reports of Its Death are Greatly Exaggerated

Pitt's Chris Briem has a nice commentary here about the state of Pittsburgh's downtown. Despite a variety of setbacks, aggregate downtown business employment is holding steady. Chris rightly zings the idea of bringing Wal-Mart downtown. With Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, and Costco tearing up the retail landscape with acres of free parking in the suburbs, why would anyone fight traffic and the parking tax to shop at Wal-Mart downtown?

So Many Websites, So Little Time

On my drive in to Oakland this morning, I saw a green, oval "PIT" decal on the window of a car next to me. I made a mental note to look up the greenpittsburgh.net website that the decal advertised in small print. Greenpittsburgh.net is the website of "Greenpittsburgh.net," a joint web-based project of ThreeRiversConnect and Sustainable Pittsburgh, cool community resource/info tech websites that are, regrettably, not well known around the region.

There is a lot of cool, progressive community development work going on around Pittsburgh. Getting the message out is important. (I'm not sure that distributing oval green "PIT" decals is the way to do it. I'm instantly reminded of the incredibly offensive "I vacation in a nicer place than you do" OBX and similar decals spreading like a fungus on SUVs around the region.)