Monday, October 12, 2009

“Masonic Drive the backbone for key city-owned facilities in Alexandria - Alexandria Daily Town Talk” plus 4 more

“Masonic Drive the backbone for key city-owned facilities in Alexandria - Alexandria Daily Town Talk” plus 4 more

Masonic Drive the backbone for key city-owned facilities in Alexandria - Alexandria Daily Town Talk

Posted: 12 Oct 2009 07:15 PM PDT

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"Right now, recreation is on one side of the street and commercial is on the other," Moller said. "But the commercial is not serving the recreation."

That can be done with new commercial or retail development, such as restaurants and speciality shops -- businesses that will attract new visitors to the city's park facilities and give them more options once they're in the area.

The city also needs to work to slow down the traffic in the area, Moller said.

"Once you calm the traffic, which you can do by permitting angled parking on the street, businesses will flourish," Moller said.

Those businesses, the thinking suggests, will service people visiting the zoo, and using City Park, the nearby tennis courts, the golf course and baseball and softball fields.

That idea, Moller said, then will be extended past Texas Avenue to the South Traffic Circle, establishing a more user-friendly environment around the Alexandria Mall and Christus St. Frances Cabrini Hospital, and eventually into downtown Alexandria.

Plans for the recreational district between Lee Street and Texas Avenue can begin shortly, Moller said, and be completed within three or four years. Eventually, the big picture will connect Masonic Drive with downtown over a period of 20 years, creating "another vital artery" in and out of downtown, in addition to Jackson Street.

"I think it's a good vision for us," Moller said.

Roy said he hopes the long-term plan can take place in less than 20 years, but he did admit creating the "transportation corridor" toward downtown will take some time to develop.

"The long-term plan will take a whole set of different changes to the current transportation grid in that area," Roy said.

Jonathan Goins, who represents City Council District 3, has his attorney's office across from the mall at Masonic Drive and Simmons Street. He called the thoroughfare proposal "much-needed."

He said it could help jump-start a "renaissance period" for the Alexandria Mall, which draws customers from a regional market of more than 335,000 people.

"I think it will provide an economic boon," Goins said. "Restaurateurs and different stores will be more willing to come to the area once they see investment from the government and once they see a true 'spark' taking placing along this corridor."

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Bible classes slow to appear in schools - Houston Chronicle

Posted: 12 Oct 2009 08:33 PM PDT

Two years ago state lawmakers made it OK for schools to provide elective Bible classes but, so far, few Houston-area school districts have taken them up on the offer.

The 2007 law requires schools, beginning this year, to include some Bible literacy in history and literature classes. Bible classes are optional but encouraged under the law. The thinking is that educated students must be familiar with biblical references and themes that pervade culture and society.

"It's not like a Bible study like you have at church," said Gale Drummond, assistant superintendent of secondary education for Conroe ISD. "It's about looking at the Bible and its influence in Western civilization."

The Willis school district began offering a Bible class at its high school last fall, and the Conroe school district will offer a class at two of its five high schools in the spring. Students in the Montgomery County districts signed petitions requesting the classes.

Mike Stratton, a history teacher at The Woodlands High School in the Conroe school district, expects to teach a Bible class in the spring that examines many religious views.

Houston Independent School District officials said none of its high schools offer Bible classes.

A renewed interest

State Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, authored the bill to return Bible classes to public schools in a way that would be compliant with a 1963 Supreme Court's ruling that called devotional study of the Bible unconstitutional. Even though justices emphasized the importance of the Bible in studying history, literature and civilization, many schools quit offering Bible classes after the ruling in fear of violating the separation of church and state, he said.

A renewed interest in Bible classes seems to have struck the nation in the past few years. Many states have introduced Bible bills, and some states, such as Texas, Georgia and Tennessee, have passed laws mandating Bible classes or the inclusion of Bible literacy in core classes.

Reasons for trend

What's prompting the trend is twofold, say religious education experts. There's a legitimate interest in the liberal arts value of Bible literacy and there's also an ideological agenda, they said. Some people are popularizing Bible classes as a way of promoting the point of view that America was founded strictly on Christian values, said Mark Chancey, head of the religious department at SMU.

"It's a reflection of the political times," he said.

Local districts' slow response to Texas' law could signal fear of dealing with the complicated and controversial issue. It's one ripe with legal mine fields. Some districts, including one in Ector County in West Texas, have landed in court when critics argued that the curriculum crossed the fine line between teaching and preaching.

Texas' new law, some people say, is promising because it safeguards religious freedom and quells proselytizing. There's concern, though, that a lack of resources and vague curriculum standards are undermining the law.

"The state is encouraging Bible classes and providing very little help and resources on how to do it the right way," said Dan Quinn, communication director for the Texas Freedom Network, a nonprofit watchdog group. "Our research showed school districts are not equipped."

TEA spokeswoman DeEtta Culbertson said the agency did not seek state funding because teacher training and materials were already available at the schools. The agency will likely pursue funding during the next Legislative session, she said.

Objectivity required

Chisum, who introduced the legislation, said he assumed the state agency would seek funding. "I'm disappointed that they never requested money," he said.

The law says Bible classes should focus on the Old and New Testaments in an objective, academic way and should accommodate diverse religious views and traditions. The classes are offered as special topics in social studies or independent study in literature and fall under standards set for those elective courses.

Many schools, however, are sticking with the required part of the law because they already have the staff and materials in place. Some teachers said that many history and literature textbooks already make reference to the Bible. It's hard to teach history or literature without mentioning the Bible, they said.

In 2006, Chancey reviewed curriculum used by Texas schools with Bible classes. He found that 22 of the 25 classes strayed from scholarly instruction and promoted fundamental Protestant beliefs. Many of the schools used a Bible curriculum developed by the National Council on Bible Curriculum for Public Schools, which has been challenged in court. The council, however, denies any legal problems.

State Board of Education Chairwoman Gail Lowe defended the standards adopted by the board, saying they are adequate and have been successfully used for the past decade by schools that offer Bible classes.

Lowe added that the state attorney general found the law and the standards constitutional.

renee.lee@chron.com

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Print Reprints - New York Times

Posted: 12 Oct 2009 08:05 PM PDT

At the end of a dark passageway at the Port Authority Bus Terminal, almost 50 artworks have suddenly parked in a bright, spare gallery. On a grim stretch of the Flatbush Avenue Extension in Brooklyn, pastel portraits and interactive sculptures are squeezed between a McDonald's and an Applebee's. In the window of a former dentist's office in downtown Jamaica, Queens, a clutch of faceless mannequins cradle various forms of roadkill.

The art may vary in style and shock value, but the settings are essentially the same — spaces donated or leased for a song by building owners unable to rent or develop them.

As the recession drags on and storefronts across New York remain empty, commercial landlords are turning to an unlikely new class of tenants: artists, who in flusher times tend to get pushed out rather than lured in. And the price of entry is not deep pockets, but vivid imaginations and splashy exhibits — anything to lend the darkened buildings a sense of life.

On terms that are cut-rate and usually temporary — a few weeks or months — the artist gets a gallery or studio, and the landlord gets a vibrant attraction that may deter crime and draw the next wave of paying tenants.

"Any sort of activity is better than no activity," said Jed Walentas, a Brooklyn developer whose company, Two Trees Management, routinely lends space in Dumbo and Downtown Brooklyn for art projects. "As long as it's short enough and it's flexible, then there's no real cost. So the question is who can you find that's going to make an investment in a space with that level of uncertainty, and often it's the artist."

These "pop-up galleries," as they are known in Britain, where the phenomenon is well established, are increasingly taking hold in New York as development advocates and landlords struggle to keep up appearances where commerce and construction have stalled.

The demand among landlords is so high that Chashama, a group that has been working for almost 15 years to find vacant real estate for visual and performing artists, no longer has to go looking. Its founder, Anita Durst, said she got calls every day from landlords asking her to find art projects for them. Some even offer to cover basic expenses like electricity.

Chashama was enlisted to find artists for the former dentist's office and another vacant space by the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation, one of several business groups working to bring artists and landlords together.

An exhibit that opened on Wednesday and will run for four months in six empty storefronts on the Flatbush Avenue Extension near DeKalb Avenue is a collaboration between the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and the New Art Dealers Alliance, a contemporary art association. A few blocks away, the MetroTech Business Improvement District approached Ad Hoc Art, which promotes street, pop and underground artists, to organize a similar installation on Willoughby Street that will run through Nov. 4.

At the Port Authority terminal, where a 2,500-square-foot retail space at West 41st Street and Eighth Avenue has gone unrented while a development deal remains in limbo, executives have relied on the Fashion Center Business Improvement District and the Times Square Alliance to bring in a series of pop-up tenants, including fashion designers and, in a show that opened on Thursday, artists working in a range of media.

The sudden glut of available space has even spawned a new player in the art world.

No Longer Empty, an outfit formed by a group of established curators about five months ago in response to the recession-fueled vacancies, has staged several exhibitions and events. One opened the weekend of Oct. 3 at a former belt factory in Brooklyn that once made "invisible dog" novelty leashes, and another installation is planned for the empty Tower Records store at East Fourth Street and Broadway in Manhattan.

"I really do think it's something that's here to stay," said Manon Slome, a founder of the group. "I obviously hope the economic crisis will be over, but I see it as a great way for the public to interact with art in a different way. And it does provide a great platform for artists because they can do things that are maybe more experimental or larger than they could in a gallery space."

Lishan Chang, an environmental artist who secured studio space in the former dentist's office in Jamaica, said the storefront was perfect for his current project, "Accident Realm," which features the dead raccoons, hawks, opossums, skunks and other creatures he finds along highways.

"I need a large sink when I do my taxidermy, and this office has a large sink," said Mr. Chang, who learned to preserve the carcasses at the National Taiwan University and on YouTube. "I use chemicals and dentists use chemicals, so it fits."

For neighborhoods, windows filled with stencils or weavings rather than brown paper and "for rent" signs have been a marked improvement.

"The lights are always on, the artists come and go late at night, and it's even had more of an impact in activating the street than we anticipated," said Andrew M. Manshel of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation. As the redevelopment of the area continues, he said, he will work to find a way for the artists to have more permanent space.

The shows have played well with the locals. Passers-by and workers say they like having something different to look at and a chance to talk with the artists. On 161st Street in Jamaica one afternoon, two barbers from the block said they appreciated how accessible the artists had been.

"The first time they were there, they welcomed anybody, it was free and on the way out they gave you a little wine, they had food," said one barber from the Haircutter shop, who gave his name as Junior. "It's great."

His co-worker, James Tucker, said it was "different, cultural-wise," saying that he liked some of the artwork but that he found Mr. Chang's roadkill project "really creepy." Junior added, laughing, "He should do a Halloween thing with that."

Two weekends ago on the Flatbush Avenue Extension near the Fulton Mall, Kenny Scharf, a psychedelic painter and performance artist, spray-painted what he described as "a big red monster mean guy being parasitically sucked on by some yellow guys" for a group show concentrating on large-scale works. As he worked, people stopped by to ask what he was doing and snap pictures with their cellphones.

"I really like that," said Demetria Hayes, who was waiting for the bus outside the impromptu gallery. "He could do a lot with that."

Ms. Hayes, who is pregnant, stood outside to escape the spray-paint fumes while her daughter, Danisia Peterson, 12, who likes to draw faces, chatted with Mr. Scharf inside and watched him work.

"A lot of people, especially kids, like to work like that through art," Ms. Hayes said, "and to show how easy it is to just draw on the wall hopefully shows them they can do it and be creative, too."

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Commentary: Lawyers Should Be Recruited Like Doctors - Law.com

Posted: 12 Oct 2009 07:51 PM PDT

The current oversupply of new associates has sent law firms scrambling to implement short-term adjustments, such as secondments and deferrals. But the legal profession needs more than temporary half-measures. The new-associate recruitment market is fundamentally broken, and it has been for some time. Incremental changes are not going to address its underlying problems. The market needs a structural fix -- a centralized matching authority, like the one that the medical profession has been using for more than half a century.

Firms make most of their new-associate offers to their summer interns. Thus, associate recruitment mostly happens at the intern-selection level. Summer internships operate as a bilateral matching market, in which law firms rank the candidates they interview and the candidates rank firms with which they wish to intern. The labor market "clears" in a decentralized manner. Law firms choose schools from which to interview, interested students at those schools apply to particular firms, the interviewing firms offer summer internship positions to specific students, and the students decide whether to accept the offers.

This decentralized clearing of the labor market leads to predictable inefficiencies, to the detriment of both firms and students. First, it creates bad matches. A firm waits for a top-ranked candidate to decline its offer before making an offer to a second-ranked candidate, who by then has gone elsewhere, perhaps to their second-ranked firm. The same dynamic occurs on the other side of the market: A candidate who is wait-listed by their first-ranked firm risks that forgoing a second-ranked firm could leave them without an offer from either. Candidates hoard offers, and firms make "exploding offers" that push candidates to decide very soon after receiving them.

Second, the job market can "unravel." A second-tier firm tries to preempt first-tier firms by approaching students earlier and making them time-bound offers. First-tier firms respond by also moving their recruitment dates up. This spurs second-tier firms to move their recruitment dates further up. The same dynamic occurs among law schools. A second-tier school opens its campus recruitment window just a little earlier than first-tier schools, hoping to encourage firms to make more internship offers to its students than they would otherwise. Recognizing that they are being preempted, first-tier schools also move up their recruitment windows, encouraging a second-tier school to move still earlier.

The consequence is that recruitment occurs long before jobs begin. Currently students are recruited at the beginning of their second year of law school, almost two years before starting their jobs. This situation causes three main problems deleterious to both the firms and the candidates: Firms have to recruit based on limited information, the labor market becomes inflexible and summer internships lose meaning.

At recruitment time, students have been through only one year of graduate school. Many have no full-time work experience. Other than from the interviews themselves, firms judge candidates' abilities principally through extrapolation from the reputation of their law schools and their first-year grades. Since these are exceedingly important determinants of where the students will get their first jobs, both law school admission and first-year academic performance become even more stressful and laden with meaning for law students. Over the next two years of law school, students will learn their strengths and weaknesses, interests and passions. But neither the students nor the hiring firms are able to use those insights and information; job assignments have already been made. Instead, many of the students, secure in the knowledge of where they will go upon graduation, pay less attention to second- and third-year courses.

As demonstrated by law firms' current predicament, recruiting two years before jobs begin introduces rigidity into the labor market. If the economic environment changes dramatically, firms, unable to easily adjust their new associate numbers, face a supply-demand imbalance: undercapacity, if times are better than expected; overcapacity, if times are worse (as is the case now). In difficult times, firms have to renege on implicit commitments to new hires (such as reducing the ratio of summer candidates to whom they make job offers or postponing start dates) or force current junior and midlevel associates to bear the brunt of the stress (such as through layoffs).

In the current system, internships lose their value. Properly conducted, internships are opportunities for firms and prospective associates to try out one another, evaluate such soft elements as the firm's work environment and culture and the intern's work ethic and collegiality, and eventually gauge the fit between the firm and the intern.

Law firm summer internships currently do not perform this filtering function. If a firm considers not offering a position to an intern, it likely no longer has access to second- or third-ranked choices, since they would probably have been offered jobs in the firms at which they interned. Thus, a firm will choose to extend an offer even to a less-than-ideal intern. Similarly, a student may not be happy at the firm with which they interned but hesitates to reject an offer because they will be forced to interview only with firms that have not been able to fill their job openings with interns. Thus, summer internships have become formalities. Firms try to not cause prospective associates to worry too much about their jobs and interns try not to create unnecessary waves.

These problems can be addressed by creation of a centralized matching authority. Under such a system, participating firms would still interview candidates for summer placement. At these interviews, candidates and firms would still be free to discuss any aspects of the internships. But the firms would not make offers directly to students, nor would students finalize placement at the time of the interview. Instead, firms would give the matching authority their preference ranking of candidates, along with the number of seats they have available. Students would give the matching authority their preference ranking of firms. On a preannounced date, the matching authority would match the firms with the candidates, taking into account both sides' preferences.

The matches would be made through an algorithm. These have long been in use and shown to work well in other settings. The best-known is the algorithm employed by the national medical residents matching program. Since 1952, a centralized matching bureau has annually assigned medical school graduates to their first jobs as residents. The algorithm, with some modifications, remains in use to this day, with very high levels of voluntary participation from both sides of the market, placing 20,000 graduating physicians in their jobs every year.

Careful studies of the matches have demonstrated that the algorithm does not favor either side of the market and allows few possibilities for strategic behavior by participants. An antitrust case that argued that centralized matching depressed resident salaries was dismissed by a federal district court in August 2004. Also in 2004, Congress passed legislation clarifying that the matching program does not violate antitrust laws. With use, the matching algorithm has become increasingly sophisticated, allowing the matching bureau to take into account considerations such as paired geographical preferences of couples who enter the labor market at the same time.

For centralized matching to be effective in the legal profession, major schools and firms must sign on. Once major schools and firms have agreed to centralized matching, other schools and firms can choose to join the regime, or, if they stay away, risk signaling lower quality to the market. Nonparticipation can be reduced if participating schools and firms commit to giving priority to other participating firms and schools.

It is crucial that members of the matching authority understand the concerns of both sides of the labor market but be independent of each. The matching authority should have the right to investigate allegations of cheating and punish those who it finds to have broken the rules. To retain independence, the matching authority should be financially self-sufficient, funded by fees from member firms and small fees from candidates who request matches.

Because matching would be done by a centralized authority on a particular date, problems associated with decentralized matching would disappear. Inefficient matches would be avoided. If a candidate or a law firm is unable to get its first-rank choice, they can seek a second-rank choice before moving further down their preference ranking. Market unraveling would be prevented by the matching authority disciplining schools or firms that encourage or make offers ahead of the match date. Rule-breakers could be fined or suspended from the matching regime.

Once unraveling is prevented, recruitment could be rolled back to dates closer to the summer internships. Firms would have more information on candidates. Students would focus on learning in the early part of the second year and develop a deeper appreciation of their own interests and strengths before recruitment begins.

If centralized matching is beneficial to market participants on both sides and addresses most of the problems of decentralized matching, why has such a system not emerged already in the legal profession? There are three reasons: concern with centralization of power, the challenge of instituting collective action and resistance to change.

Some market participants recoil from the idea of centralized matching because they conflate centralized markets with centralization of power. Centralized matching does not take choice away from individual students or firms. Instead, it provides a common platform for the labor market to function efficiently. In that regard, it is akin to a stock exchange, which allows people to execute trades according to their individual preferences but within the ambit of explicit rules that increase the efficiency and robustness of trading.

Centralized matching requires collective action. Most of the major market participants have to agree to a centralized matching regime to make it work. Individual schools and firms feel unable to move to such a system on their own. Because of this inertia, the existing system prevails, even though individual market participants have to live with its inefficiencies.

Replacing the current system with centralized matching might make recruitment officers at firms and placement officers at schools feel threatened, even though it would allow both recruitment offices and placement offices to focus on what their primary goals ought to be -- for the former, finding and ranking the best candidates and encouraging them to choose their firm, and for the latter, advising students on application and interview strategies and prioritization of preferences. However, because centralized matching obviates the need for their involvement in the match process itself, individual recruitment officers or placement officers might perceive it as diminishing their roles and resist its introduction.

A transition to centralized matching, therefore, is unlikely to be triggered by a bottom-up process or through the initiative of individual law schools or law firms. It requires the shared commitment of leaders of law schools and law firms. Centralized matching will become a reality only if they concur that it is superior to decentralized matching and are prepared to establish a matching authority with the requisite capability and authority. Is it time to institute this radical but much-needed change?

Ashish Nanda is Robert Braucher Professor of Practice, Faculty Director of Executive Education, and Research Director at the Program on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School.


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Crazy Horse Celebrating Cultures - KELOLAND TV

Posted: 12 Oct 2009 07:51 PM PDT

To the rest of the country, Monday was Columbus Day, but in South Dakota, we celebrated Native American Day. The late Governor George Mickelson declared the holiday 20 years ago, and the day's significance grows every year for South Dakota tribes.

Music, dancing and a dynamite blast were all used to honor the nation's Native Americans at Crazy Horse Memorial.

"It means a lot to me because I think that is completely impressive that this is the only state that recognizes it as Native American Day," Miss Black Hills Sunni Wilkinson said.

Schools from around the area joined tourists at the popular attraction for a close-up look at how Native American culture has influenced the state.

"It's special because we get to have that history right there at our fingertips, and so we get to learn so much about it," Custer 8th Grader Rachel Petik said.

Among those in the crowd was Mt. Rushmore superintendent Gerard Baker, who left his own monument to pay tribute to another representing a Lakota leader.

"We are very proud Americans, but we also recognize who we are as a culture and never let that die. That's what this day is all about," Baker said.

It's the 20th year they've celebrated Native American Day at Crazy Horse Memorial, and people attending say there's no better setting for such a holiday.

"It is absolutely fantastic.  It is a sense of pride that should be felt on all sides of the fences, I think, and the bottom line is that it's long-overdue," Baker said.

Learning about the history that's shaped our state and the history that's still being shaped.

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