Yeah! Cleveland gets mentioned in the Civic Strategies eLetter:

Cleveland is getting ready to do some major work on its main street, Euclid Avenue. It’s planning to build bus lanes, expand the sidewalks and put in trees and other improvements. But first it has to fill in the vaults. How’s that? Just beneath downtown Cleveland’s sidewalks, there’s a honeycomb of vaults that were once used for storing coal and heating oil or as freight entrances for businesses. (These were called “pop-ups.” A bell would ring loudly, metal sidewalk grates would open, and a elevator would slowly rise to the sidewalk.) “Most people are surprised to find out that underneath, the sidewalk is hollow,” said a local architect. The vaults have been abandoned for years but city officials worry that they might not withstand heavier uses overhead. So the city wants to reinforce or simply fill them in with concrete. Cost of the work: $9 million. So, in their inspection tours, have city workers found anything interesting tucked away in Cleveland’s vaults � say, a nice wine collection or perhaps a missing Rembrandt or two? Nah. “These are underground concrete pits,” says the city’s public works director. “There’s no romance in the vaults.”

Cool.

Don’t forget, Friday afternoons a bunch of us gather at Cafe AhRoma in Trinity Commons for coffee and talk. I’ll be there around 2ish and will probably stay a few hours. Hope to see you there!

Anita Campbell comments:

The problem with statistics like this is what they don’t show.

They don’t do a good job of picking up the self-employed, the consultants, the freelancers, the startups and other small businesses. They give a somewhat understated view of the employment/business picture.

For instance, I have no doubt that I would be an unemployed statistic according to this kind of chart. Yet I am a business owner. I have no desire for a “job.” A job doesn’t jive with my view of myself as a free agent. And I suspect that is much the same way that many readers of BFD feel about themselves — many of you are yourselves free agents.

And I am not talking about election year politics and attempts to sway jobs figures to suit one political party or another. That’s just political noise.

The real story is the “smalling” of American business. It is a fundamental change in the U.S. economy that has been gradually building for years. Traditional jobs statistics aren’t exact enough to pick up all the nuances about how people earn their livelihoods in the 21st century USA.

Bill Callahan responds:

Anita’s point is the heart of the (currently quite politicized) argument between economists who prefer the BLS “establishment survey” statistics — gathered by surveying a very large sample of employers — and those who like the Census Bureau’s monthly “household survey”, which asks a much smaller sample of individuals about their employment status. The “household survey” is currently showing better job growth than the establishment survey, which might be because it catches more startups and self-employed people (or maybe not). Economists who prefer to rely on the establishment survey seem to be in the majority, and include not just Dems but also Alan Greenspan… but there are obviously arguments on both sides, and I agree with Anita that the “smalling” of firms and churning of positions raises important questions about the survey approach.

Just for the record, here’s one defense of the establishment survey as a prime source of national job numbers.

As a non-economist I’d just add two things:
1) The government doesn’t break the household survey numbers down to the local level because the sample’s too small, so it’s useless as a marker of Cleveland area employment; and
2) While the BLS establishment survey includes as “employed” only people who are reported as receiving income, I know a lot of folks who might well tell the Census they’re “self-employed” or “business owners”, but who aren’t making a nickel.

Rockin’ good news:

Techworld reports that the London Ambulance Service is using an application that switches among different networks according to priority. If they are within range of a Wi-Fi network, they use it to download maps to get to a patient, but if no Wi-Fi network is available, they switch over to GPRS (for example, to transmit patient data back to a hospital). According to the London Ambulance Service, the new system has saved them a lot of time: “It used to take approximately one minute to pass the call details to an ambulance crew by voice and then the crews may have needed to look where the destination was in their map books. Now it takes typically two seconds for all the call details to be sent to the ambulance, and the PC in the vehicle tells the navigation equipment where the destination is.”

From unmediated:

Last three Mondays I was having a workshop “DOCUMENTING PERFORMANCE ART” on streaming with Coco Fusco’s class at Columbia University. For the last session students were to come up with a short (three minute) performance that we have streamed live. Streams and torrents for the clips are here.

Via World Changing:

�Designs on Democracy was a three day conference on design, advertising, public relations and marketing for social change…. The conference was organized by a crew of eight activists. Forty volunteers did the work that made it happen for the 350 who attended. Designs on Democracy, said Favianna Rodriguez, one of the organizers: �is not just for designers, it�s for people who are in the business of doing marketing and selling the image of the Left, to take it to a broader audience and make it more appealing.��

They�ve already posted two pages of notes and several audio files of the conference sessions in Ogg Vorbis format. More audio, video, and documentation is on the way.

Great info. Click thru for the links.

Call me weird, but this is cool and innovative:

Nature reports that on the 21st of April, Austrian scientists used quantum cryptography to transfer a US$3,500 donation to their laboratory.The article explains.”Quantum cryptography uses the odd properties of quantum particles to create secure keys for encoding and decoding messages.The very act of observing these particles changes their nature, making it easy to detect any eavesdroppers.

A beautiful post by a young, talented woman who’s doing cool things here:

I’ve traveled and lived other places and may live other places again, but I have this feeling that whenever someone asks me where �home� is for me, I’ll always say �Cleveland�.

Please click through the title and read it in it’s entirety.