Nine Shift

Miami latest to build downtown

Miami is the latest city to experience a building boom downtown, part of the trend from suburbs to dense neighborhoods (Shift #Five).

From New York Times story by Robin Pogrebin, "Miami is in the midst of a major building explosion, one that will almost certainly bring thousands of new residents into the downtown area. Like many cities around the country, Miami is trying to remake its business district into a place where people live, shop and play around the clock.... Anchoring this effort is the immense Miami Performing Arts Center."

What do you think? Are arts centers really a primary force for people to move back downtown?

Is Patricia Mace black?

A little historical perspective on the previous post, Multicultural Incompetence.

We're looking for photos of people in different generations for the cover of Julie's new book, Generational Learning Styles.  And some diversity in the photos.  So I found this pin-up picture in my grandfather's scrapbook.  Picture of Patricia Mace, from around 1943.  "That ain't no white girl," Julie remarks, but we don't know.  Is/was Patricia Mace black?

She appeared in three movies in 1943, but can find no more info on her.  And maybe/probably she could "pass."  Few young people today, including/especially those of color, would know what that word means. And that's a good thing. We have made some progress.  In the 1960s, my co-author Julie Coates risked her life, including KKK death attempts, for civil rights. Let us know if you can find anything more on Ms. Mace.  (Post 2 on the topic. Thanks to Michael Epstein of Hurrell Photographs for permission to use the picture in the book.)

Multicultural incompetence

This has to be a positive turning point in society.

Companies are refusing to recruit graduates of some University of Wisconsin-Madison schools not only because there are so few minority graduates, but because the white students are not prepared for a multicultural workplace.

This is great news for society. As the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article notes: "As they struggle to compete in a global economy, companies are building diverse work forces that reflect their customers. Their reservations with UW-Madison go beyond its small number of minority graduates. Companies complain that white students from the university are not prepared for a multicultural workplace."

'Multicultural incompetence of UW-Madison graduates has prompted corporations to end or threaten to end their recruitment here,' said Bernice Durand, associate vice chancellor for diversity and climate.

So, minority recruitment is no longer good social policy, it is now also essential economic and business policy as we all work in a multicultural business scene. (Part I of two posts on this issue. Photo from a current LERN promotion)

The world is not flat

Well, as many NineShift fans also like and compare the book to Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat, this is hard to write.  Keep in mind that pilots don't like flying jokes. And authors- -  like cooks, relatives and competitive people in general - - find it hard to be compared to other cooks, relatives and authors.

So, here's where I disagree with Friedman.

* The world is not flat.
Not literally, figuratively, nor economically.  Global economics came into being in the 1880s, according to British historian E.J. Hobsbawm, and much of the world, including Africa, Latin America, the Mideast, and much of Asia, is not competing directly nor indirectly with America.

* America did not invent the 21st century.
Ameri-centrism is neither reality, nor is it helpful to mislead a nation into thinking it created the most important forces impacting the world.  Oddly, his "the ten forces that flattened the world" were all created by Americans.  In reality, the single most important force that has changed the world is the WorldWideWeb, invented by a Brit. The web is not even on Friedman's list.  Sorry, but UPS fixing laptops doesn't come close to being one of the ten most important forces. This lack of perspective is what doomed the British Empire 100 years ago.

* An oil based auto economy is neither possible nor beneficial for the U.S.
   "Give me $10 a barrel oil," he says on page 462. But America and post-industrial countries can neither can run on wasteful oil consumption, nor should they.  This is part of the last century, not this one. $10 a barrel oil would destroy humanity in about 65 years. This perspective also has unavoidable undesirable human and political consequences, like invading countries to get their oil, which unfortunately Mr. Friedman supports.

* "We get our share" (page 469).
"Our share" currently is having 4% of the world's population getting and using, by whatever means necessary, 35% of the world's resources.  Somehow Americans have to understand that the other 96% of the world does not think we have an inherit right to a disproportionate share of the world's resources.

Those are some of the main differences between NineShift and World is Flat.
How do you compare the two books?

The Amish and ATMs

Self described fan of NineShift, Fred Bayley of Spindale, North Carolina, sent this interesting picture.

Any thoughts folks?

American Snafu

This is fascinating: On the day before Katrina hit New Orleans, everyone was told to evacuate. From the New Yorker magazine, here’s the story.

“The Saturday before the storm, I got a call from some French tourists who wanted to evacuate,” said Pierre Lebovics, France’s consul-general in New Orleans. They went to the most logical place, for Europeans: the train station. “Someone had decided to close the railway station on the day they were telling people to evacuate. These tourists found that quite extraordinary.”

Extraordinary, that’s a polite way of saying stupid, idiotic, or incredibly stupid and idiotic.

  A few weeks later, a minor snafu* in Houston illustrated the futile nature of the car once again. It proved useless as an evacuation mechanism.

  The lessons. 1. Americans still don’t see trains as transportation. 2. Europeans do, in fact they see trains as more “logical” for transportation than cars. I was talking with a German-born auto executive from Detroit, who told me, “Every one in Europe has a car. And they drive them on Sundays.” Yes, there are traffic jams in Tokyo, Moscow and London. But they all are one perceptual step ahead of us in transitioning to mass transit.

 Snafu is an acronym the GIs created in WWII meaning: Situation Normal, All Fouled Up

Brain games to boost your IQ

Here's a game to boost your IQ, but also to keep your brain "young" and thus lengthen your life.
It is sure to be a big hit with Boomers, who will do anything to live forever young.
It also illustrates the value of the new research on the brain.

Currently being played with a Nintendo all over Japan, it will come to U.S. and other countries soon.
Conceived by a leading brain researcher, the game exercises your brain. The object is to score low, the lower the score, the younger your brain becomes.  Would you play this game?

"Whoa Nellie"

Out of the 1,100 people who read this NineShift weblog each monthly, only my colleague Greg Marsello complains that there's not enough sports here.

Recently college football legendary announcer Keith Jackson retired after broadcasting college football games for 40 games.  His trademark phrase was "Whoa Nellie!"  For 5 points, what is the origin of this phrase and what does it mean?

But but people don't "want" to live near trains

Well, the argument against most of the 21st century transition, coming mainly from aging Boomers of course, is that people don't "want" to live near train stations, work from home, and so on. Our basic argument is that these changes are happening because of economics - - what's good for your job, family, etc. - - and that economics beats "wants" anytime. 

But there's new evidence that many people DO in fact want to live near a train station. Robert Cervero, head of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley, was interviewed recently by NPR's Don Gonyea.  Cervero says that 20-25% of people are "very receptive" to living in a neighborhood near a light rail or train station. That's huge.

We also like the irony of being interviewed by Gonyea, who spent most of his career covering Detroit and the auto industry.