Blogs
Hedge Funds, Lending, and Basic Finance
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 05/12/2007 - 14:34I’ve spent most of my professional life working on Wall Street, and a fair amount of that time working with hedge funds. Over the past few years, I’ve moved over to spend more of my time working with politics and non-profits. Now, the mainstream media is starting to look at hedge funds and lending and how this relates to the political process.
John Edwards worked for a hedge fund. Barack Obama is having a major fundraising event in Greenwich CT at the house of one of the top names in hedge funds. Chris Dodd received over $380,000 in donations from a single hedge that has become a big player in funding campaigns.
A lot of people are attacking these candidates, yet these attacks seem to reflect a basic lack of understanding about hedge funds, lending or finance. More details below the fold.
Videoblogging as an antidote to too much TV
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/11/2007 - 10:53Several recent articles have caught my attention and have led me to the assertion that what we need to do to address problems with broadcast television isn’t more regulation, it’s more videoblogging.
Yesterday, the Christian Science Monitor had an editorial entitled, Time to tame TV violence. The subtitle went on to say, “The media industry has not self-regulated to the satisfaction of parents. The government should step in.”
This went hand in glove with an article in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor:
For teens, too much TV can impair learning later, study says
If your 14-year-old is sitting in front of the TV for hours a day, your concerns about your teenager's education may be borne out.
That's because watching three or more hours of television a day leads to poor homework completion, negative attitudes toward school, bad grades, and poor performance in college, according to a study published this week.
Yet the question is, what is it about watching three or more hours of television a day that brings about poor performance and negative attitudes? Is it the violence, or is it something else?
An article in the Salem Oregon StatesmanJournal may provide an interesting clue. Students learn to thrive by not being bystanders.
According to a recent study, a kid's academic success may depend on whether he believes in his own ability to grow smarter.
Researchers divided poorly performing middle-school students into two groups and arranged for kids in both groups to receive intense, remedial instruction. Those in the second group, however, were also taught to understand intelligence as an expanding opportunity, rather than an unchangeable destiny. After several months, testing revealed slightly improved scores in the first group, but soaring success among students in the second.
Perhaps it is the passivity of so much television viewing that is the main culprit. Passive television viewers aren’t typically presented with the idea of ‘expanding opportunity’. The biggest opportunities they have are texting their votes to American Idol. The real opportunities seem to be reserved for those who make media. Perhaps our education system needs to be changed to help students understand the great opportunities that are available to them as a result of technological innovation.
Jonny Goldstien has a very interesting blog entry that relates to this. He videotaped Ed Markey, Chairman of the Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee, as Markey videotaped the hearings. People can bring their cameras to congress and create their own videos. There is even a new project, Open Source Cinema where people are working collaboratively to create a documentary about copyright in a digital age.
Groups like The Center for 21st Century Skills, Youth Rights Media, and Third World Majority are bringing media creation to students, and, I believe providing a real example of the expanding opportunity that technological innovation is bringing. Tufts New Literacy Summer Institute will be training teachers this summer in how to bring these expanded opportunities to the classroom.
Will more regulation of what can be broadcast over the airwaves address some of the problems we face as a nation? Perhaps. But it seems clear to me that if we want to have a real impact, we need to teach everyone that they have the power to change their lives and the change our country, and that an important starting point is to teach students the importance of creating their own media.
(Cross posted at Greater Democracy)
Thinking Blogger Award
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 05/10/2007 - 12:06Today, I got tagged by Rod with the Thinking Blogger Award.
It is an interesting meme floating around, mostly in the MyBlogLog space. The idea is that if you are tagged with the award, you get to tag five other people with the award. These sorts of memes are the chain letters of the blogosphere.
As an illustration, from the look inside MyBlogLog, we find that they have around 50,000 users, as of May 2007. Assuming that everyone who gets tagged, tags five other people, and there is no overlap or breaking of the chain, after the sixth round, we run out of people on MyBlogLog.
I tried tracking back my Thinking Blogger Award Ancestory. I (1) was tagged by Rod (2) who was tagged by Skipper (3). Skipper was tagged by Loz (4), who was tagged by Paisley (5). Paisley was tagged by Walter (6) who was tagged by Danielle (7).
With that, we’ve gone past the 50,000 members of MyBlogLog, if everyone was in MyBlogLog, there were no breaks, etc. However, Danielle illustrates where this analysis fails. She has been tagged three times already.
Are there really 50,000 blogs that make people think? ilker yoldas started this off with the comment, Too many blogs, not enough thoughts!, and I wonder if the meme has reached the end of its usefulness. After all, if I’ve been awarded a thinking blogger award, perhaps the award has finally jumped the shark.
Perhaps some of the problem is what seems to me to be various blogging ghettos. The Thinking Blogger Award seems to be stuck in the MyBlogLog world. Political bloggers, and perhaps even non-profit bloggers are all to serious for this sort of stuff. Some of them are so ghettoized, they never read or link to anything outside of their parochial community.
So, I’m going to try and break this. I’m going to save my nominations for my next post and spend time thinking about blogs beyond the SAHM/WAHM/SEO/Pet/Knitting MyBlogLog world. I’m going to try to be a connector. Let’s see where we can go with this.
Promoting the Urban Forest
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/09/2007 - 20:01When I was down at the Stamford Government Center the other day for peace rally, I noticed a sign on all the trees outside of the Government Center.
Public Notice
Tree RemovalIn accordance with the provisions of Ordinance No. 814- Article 1B Sections (4) and (5), NOTICE is hereby given of intent to remove this tree 30 days from the date of this posting.
When I took the picture of the sign, a security guard came up and told me the trees had to come down because they had termites. I knocked on the wood and it seemed pretty solid to me. The trees looked fairly healthy, so I wondered what this was all about.
Later, I started to receive emails from various people asking why the trees were being removed. People talked about sending letters to the Stamford Advocate, to the Tree Warden, and the Mayor’s office in order to get a public hearing about whether or not the trees should be removed. One person wrote that a person from City Hall said the trees were dead or dying and that was the reason they were getting cut down.
I figured I’d make a few calls myself to see what I could find out. I called the number listed on the form, and got an answering machine. I also called the number of a person on the environmental protection board.
Later in the day, I got a phone call from Erin McKenna, who is a Senior Planner at the City of Stamford’s Land Use Bureau. She provided lots of valuable information. The trees in question, honey locust, are not diseased. They are fine, although they are planted a little too closely together which has hampered their growth. They had been planned to be taken down as part of a project to install a sculpture donated by Rubin Nakian.
The plan is to install the sculpture as part of an overall redesign of the entrance to the Government Center. The new entrance is to be designed by Wesley Stout Associates. They are an award winning landscape design firm, whom I was told are very environmentally conscious. The design should be more attractive and provide better shade.
The current schedule is to wait until the plan is received from the design firm. The plan will then be reviewed internally and then publicly. There will be a public hearing about the removal of the trees, but they are hoping to wait until then plan is available to the public before holding such a hearing.
Digital Palimpsest
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 05/08/2007 - 19:55Yesterday, I hit a milestone, of sorts. Over the past couple of months I’ve been on the road to one event or another. I’ve tried to keep up with my blogging, my emails, and my life in general, but things have slowly gotten out of hand. I climbed up to around 1400 unread emails. I haven’t looked at Bloglines in ages. My visits to NewsTrust are cursory at best, rarely resulting in a review. Yesterday, I looked at the pile of unread emails, and found the oldest date back for two months.
As I got through my emails, I try to catch the most important ones on as timely a basis as possible, put others pile up and some slip through the cracks. I can only spend so much time plowing through old emails, so I balance it out with other ways of trying to keep my figures on the digital pulse.
I often rant against those who spend all their time in the progressive blogosphere. I know how easy it is to do. If you make a concerted effort to stay on top of DailyKos, MyDD, and your regional progressive blogging community, there isn’t a lot of time to read much else. But there is so much more to read.
As I try to balancing things out, I sometime check Bloglines for other blogs that I’ve found interesting. I hop over to BlogExplosion to see where it will take me, and recently I’ve been exploring sites like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog. All of this works together to create a complex digital palimpsest.
So, instead of trying to capture a clear picture of what I’ve been reading, I thought I would note random tidbits that have caught my eye. There are a lot of SAHM, and WAHM blogs. For those not up on the mommy blogging culture, that is Stay At Home Moms and Work At Home Blogs. These are all wonderful follow-ons to the fertility blogs and the pregnancy blogs. After delivery, there are the moms trying to keep passion alive, even aspiring to be MILFs.
As much as I love my wife and family, I do not describe myself on my blog in terms of whose spouse and whose parent I am, the way many people do, and I find Offsprung’s perspective particularly refreshing: “Welcome to the perfect online antidote to a parenting culture gone barking mad”.
I’ve always been interested in homeschooling. Learning is a life long activity and schooling should take place at home, whether or not kids are also being schooled elsewhere. Many people think of homeschoolers as the religious conservatives that don’t want their children in schools where evolution is taught. Yet I found a wonderful blog, Homeschooling Evolved. They have a link to a life-sized online whale. Another fun blog in this area is Fish Feet. She has a great graph of Global Tetrapod Diversity
There is more to schooling than just science. I find myself wandering through various blogs of freelance writers. Some are offering ideas to other writers. Some are writing about their own writing, or trying out new things. I remember stumbling across the phrase, “Butterfly effect in reverse”, and “Pinocchio’s now a boy who wants to turn back into a toy”. Then, there are all the discussions about 18,000 nude volunteers in Mexico City. Meanwhile, I read about people playing with the Hasbro Vcam Now 2.0 video camera and whether or not you can use a child’s toy to create art.
All of this, without any sort of social conscience is but vanity, and sites like World without Oil, Our Hearts for Haiti, and the National Human Services Assembly help keep this in perspective.
So, I’m catching up on my emails. I’m keeping my eyes open online, and I’m finding that just like in face to face experiences, I really, don’t know life, at all.
