The biggest news in North Brooklyn was in a race for one of the smallest seats: Insurgent reformer Lincoln Restler narrowly leads Warren Cohn for district leader as voters were split between two twenty-something candidates pitted on opposite sides of the county’s reform movement. Here’s all the news that’s fit to print on a tight, caffeine-aided deadline (all results reflect 100 percent of the precincts reporting)
Quotes
To the authoritarian mind, there are only two responses to a demand: submission or defiance, and anything less than total submission is defiance.
The “20th-Century bosses,” as Caputo called them, got whupped.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver isn’t the only Albany leader with a stock-portfolio stake in companies that do business with the state. Republican Senate boss Dean Skelos and his wife, Gail, own shares in 14 companies with a combined 111 state contracts worth more than $2 billion.
In an excerpt of his new book, I Live in the Future and Here’s How It Works, Nick Bilton argues that the consumer is now the center of the media world. “Now, we are always in the center of the map, and it’s a very powerful place to be. Now you are the starting point. Now the digital world follows you, not the other way around.”
In the political world, the rough analog to this digital media future is democracy. But as we’ve seen, the seeming transfer of control from lawmakers to the people is just that: seeming. To a large degree, the big media and technology companies – particularly the de facto monopolies like the mobile carriers, cable companies, etc. – still control the consumer experience. The future will be personalized, but don’t think you’ll get everything you want when you want it.
A lobbyist friend of mine—who previously worked on the staffs of two Senate Republicans—recently, and ruefully, summed up how the system now works. My friend represents a Fortune 500 company with employees in a newly elected Democratic senator’s state. He had been trying to schedule an office visit through official channels for months with the senator and his client, to no avail. Finally, my friend reached out to the senator’s chief fund-raiser, pledging that his client’s PAC intended to contribute the legal maximum to the senator’s campaign, and requesting to be placed on the senator’s fund-raising invitation list. He was stunned the following morning to be interrupted by a call from the senator, expressing a heartfelt wish to get to know his client better.
pedestrians need to get used to the idea of looking for bikes just as they look for cars. This is one are where improved bicyclist behavior can’t help. Even increased bike lanes wouldn’t help much, since in my experience the kind of pedestrians who step out into the road without looking are even more likely to step out into a bike lane without looking.
So apps are cool and powerful, but open government and open data goes much deeper than the latest iPhone app to find the best parking spots. The more the city ties public data access to app development and competitions like BigApps, the more they veer away from facilitating the public’s fundamental right to know.
these sites now have thousands of data sets on them. In order to be navigable they need to have excellent design. More importantly, you need to have a new breed of librarian – one capable of thinking in the online space – to help create a system where data sets can be easily and quickly located.
Discrepancies in the performances of the secondary education systems are relevant, it is even more so when connected with social mobility. From all the countries that have been studied, the United States is the one where the gap between the academic performance of wealthy and poor families remains the widest, as if American education was not good enough to help the intellectual and social elevation of the children with a humble background. At the opposite end, Canada, South Korea and the Scandinavian countries are where the children have, despite belonging to different social classes, the most similar results, thus showing that the education they are receiving is comparable whether they are from a rich or poor background.