LA Times: Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids? The Times used public data to figure out something that neither the LA School District nor its teachers union seem to want anyone to learn: Which teachers are good, and perhaps more importantly, which teachers hold kids back. The best part of this article: The reporters name names and then discuss the situation with the teachers themselves. Most of the “ineffective” teachers seem surprised to find out they are in that category — and a little miffed that they weren’t given information like this by the district so they could try to do something about it. Outstanding work by the Times.
One interesting thing, of course, is that unlike most of the West Side of Cleveland, which was heavily agricultural and was at one time known as “the grape capital of the country”, this specific plot of land was almost certainly never farmed at this scale before.
This piece of property, along what was then Pearl Road, was essentially downtown Ohio City in the earliest days of the community and then became the famous “Irishtown Bend,” a neighborhood invariably described using both the term “shanty” and the term “hovel”. After the Irish moved out, much of the land was eventually converted to industrial and warehouse use. And of course the plot itself happens to be on an extremely unstable hillside.
Here’s how things were laid out in 1858, just after Ohio City was annexed by Cleveland. The plot of land that the Ohio City Farm is on today is the triangle formed by Pearl, Bridge and Franklin Streets. (This is from the “Hopkins Map” of 1858.)
And here’s how the same plot of land was built up in about 1892. (This is from the Sanborn Insurance Map.)
Notice that Hicks St. and two adjacent alleyways (Pearl Alley and Terrace St.) run across the middle of current Ohio City Farm space. None of those streets exist north of Bridge St. today, although all three streets (now renamed W 24th Pl., W 24th St., and W 23rd Pl.) do still run along the east side of the West Side Market south of Bridge.
One thing that amazes me about the map above is all the streets and houses that would today be on a fairly steep hillside. Basically Terrace St. — the alley to the east of Hicks — would be at the top of the hill today and River Bed St., a section of which you can see in the upper right corner of the 1892 map, would be at the bottom. The drop there is approximately100-110 feet. I’ll need to look into this further, but one explanation might be that the hill has eroded much further to the west now.
Here’s the same space today.
Almost no buildings. Very few streets. In the late 20′s the eastern end of this area had been cleared to build the viaduct that would take trains into the new Union Terminal (known as Terminal Tower today). By 1961 the forces of Urban Renewal had managed to tear down pretty much everything north of Bridge Ave and east of West 25th St. In 1963 the Riverview Terrace housing development opened. By 1999 it had become just as blighted as the shanties it replaced and the county housing authority tore down all but the high-rise part of it.
So over its long history, large scale farming of this property was probably just not in the cards.
Until today, when a bunch of Burmese refugees are planting fancy restaurant crops there.
For years the only Turkish in Cleveland was at the Anatolia Cafe in Cedar Center. But things are changing — quickly!
I took the kids and our current Iraqi student guest Mustafa to a fairly new restaurant, Dervish, in Avon last night. Had a really great time. I’m not enough of an expert on Turkish food to know whether the various kababs we had were spectacular or just excellent, but Mustafa proclaimed them to be “exactly” like what he gets at home. So that’s gotta be pretty good.
Anyway, we probably didn’t have to go that far to get our kababs. There are (or will be) two Turkish restaurants near our house all of a sudden.
Just opened in Tremont, the Istanbul Turkish Grill, is on Professor near the corner of Starkweather. No reviews yet, but Doug Trattner blurbed it in Scene Magazine.
Later will come Alaturka, in the old Kan Zaman space at 1917 W. 25th St here in lovely Ohio City. According to the Plain Dealer, it’s going to be run by Yashar Yildirim, one of the owners of Anatolia Cafe! So that’s a good pedigree. It sounds like the restaurant should be open this fall.
Rany Jazayerly: Abd el-Kader and the Massacre of Damascus. A lot of folks have pointed to this article. I think there’s a little bit of “Hey, look: There’s a dermatologist who normally blogs about the Kansas City Royals and here he is writing a long piece about 19th century Middle East history. Weird!” Anyway, it’s a really good piece. I definitely had never heard of el-Kader despite the fact that there’s a town named after him just up Route 52 from Dubuque.
Slate: Why Do Foreigners Like Fanta So Much? Very interesting history of the product. Did you know it was created by the Nazi arm of Coca-Cola in the 40′s? Or that it was used to make soup?
Scientific American: Australia’s common wombat could soon be uncommon. The Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat population is down to a hundred or so, and has been endangered for years. Now apparently even the “common” wombat is losing population — mostly by getting run over by cars on the highway.
Consumer Reports obviously puts far more emphasis on electronic stability control than their readers do — insisting it be on any of their recommended cars and calling it “the most important safety feature since the safety belt,” because it can prevent accidents from happening instead of just protecting drivers in an accident.
Their readers seem to think that anti-lock brakes and airbags — on all cars since the early nineties — are plenty of protection for their kids. That and making sure the kids drive a huge vehicle. Many comments take issue with the “luxury” marques on the list. (Presumably on there because these brands were the first to adopt some of these safety systems.) There’s definitely a “my kid doesn’t deserve to drive that” vibe to the whole thing. I wonder how many of those folks have purchased expensive computers and televisions for those same kids…
ZDNet: Oracle rebrands Java, breaks Eclipse. Obviously this is fairly amusing. The reason that Eclipse was checking the rebranded “Company” value was to work around a different Java incompatibility.
It’s pretty clear: the Java team at Sun (now at Oracle) has done far more to destroy the concept of “write once, run everywhere” than the supposed “proprietary” bad guys at Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe. Every single update to Java breaks something. There are no concepts of “backwards compatibility” or “forwards compatibility” in the product.
After years of this kind of bad behavior, the Java development community has simply given up on trying to deal with testing on different Java versions. Now most vendors say they work with one or two specific releases of Java and that no others are supported. Many of them actually ship their products with a version of Java embedded inside.
What that means for large enterprises is that we have to deploy all those special versions of Java along with the applications that use them — at 100MB per Java instance. It’s crazy. And we pretty much have to ignore the ongoing critical security issues that Java has since many apps won’t work (or at least aren’t supported) with the newer patched versions of Java. This is crazy of course: Java integrates with browsers and attempts to interface directly with “the Internet”. Along with other products that plug into browsers (like Flash, Silverlight, and Adobe Reader) Java should be right up there on the “critical to patch” list. But it isn’t because it can’t be.
The whole thing would be funny if I didn’t have to actually deal with it.
NY Times: Botanical Gardens Look for New Lures Here’s another article that mentions the recent financial tribulations of the Cleveland Botanical Gardens — although this time the problems are implied rather than the focus of the article. It does put the issue into a broader context though: Many similar organizations are having to scramble for money, not just ones that made a poor choice to expand at the hight of the economic bubble.
NY Times: What Do You Lack? Probably Vitamin D I’ve been taking a vitamin D pill every day for a little while now. I read that it could help with my mild psoriasis. I can’t say that there’s been a significant improvement there, but it looks like there are some other possible benefits. Since I’m susceptible to sun poisoning, I guarantee that I don’t get enough sunlight to make much vitamin D on my own. It also looks like the standard recommended dose of Vitamin D may be way too low.
I totally believe this story. In fact, it sounds like Henry is probably underestimating the extent of the problem. The Frati do not currently have an iPad. On the other hand we have to treat any and all technology the way Henry’s treating his iPad. Every single electronic item in our house has some sort of limitation or restriction on its use. If we didn’t do this I’m convinced we’d all be pale slug-like creatures drowning in our own excrement.
“This is the week of doing everything. I mean, everything: I have a chart with dozens of little boxes, all waiting to be ticked off.” Again, somehow these blogger guys have been spying on the Frati. The past several days’ breakfast discussions have been around getting yet another “43 Folders” variation working for us. There’s always some issue or another. The current problem is that we put a task out there somewhere in the “folder”, but then we forget that we did that and then end up putting another variation of the same thing in there somewhere else. I guess we could have worse problems.
His commencement speech at Princeton this year. Overall a very typical graduation theme — as you can tell from the title. But his anecdote about his grandparents at the top of the talk really got me — especially as parent myself. I think all the time about the relationship between what we have and how we choose to use it. “Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?”
