Blog Update – New Host, New Look and Feel

Dear Blog Readers,

Thank you for following my blog!  The last couple months have been a lot of fun and I’ve decided to upgrade my blog from WordPress.com to a hosted WordPress.org site with a new theme.  I hope you like the new look and feel but please let me know in the comments section if you have any suggestions for improvement.

In the transition some of my links to you may have been broken.  So I apologize if you’ve needed to re-subscribe or reconnect to a particular comment thread.  Please feel free to leave a comment on this post if you’re experiencing any problems.  Also, this WordPress theme has many more options for displaying images, etc.  So I’m sure things will get shuffled around a bit for at least a few days.

Thanks again for reading.  Please let me know if you have any questions or ideas for new blog posts!

All best,

Justin

 

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Schools are Teaching our Children to be Sedentary and Obese

I recently read an interesting article in the New York Times entitled “Is Sitting a Lethal Activity“?  While I was reading the article it occurred to me that most schools are rewarding the most sedentary children and punishing children whose bodies are doing everything they can to get the exercise they need.

My son is one of those “wiggly” kids.  He’s a 2nd grade student, “all boy”, and he has always struggled in school to “keep still” and “sit quietly”.  Things are better this year because we enrolled him in a Montessori school where he has more freedom to move around but it’s still an issue.  In the public school he attended for Kindergarten and 1st grade we were always hearing from his teachers, even his gym teacher, that he needs to exercise better self control in class – meaning he has trouble sitting still and listening to them lecture.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if his “problem behavior” was actually a much healthier way to conduct himself?

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How I Deal with my Fear of Public Speaking – 10 Steps that Help me Stay Cool During Presentations

In college I was terrified of being called on during class discussions.  In grad school, I would be a nervous wreck before presentations, even in small seminars.  It didn’t get much better until I figured out a preparation process and an approach to presentations that worked for me.  Probably the biggest thing is just doing more presentations in general to become more practiced and comfortable.  Fortunately, I’ve had the opportunity to gain experience.  I still get nervous, maybe more than others and especially if it’s a big deal or a big crowd, and I don’t think that will ever go away.  But I’m no longer terrified because I have a routine that, when followed, allows me to be far more comfortable and typically do a reasonably good job.  Here’s the set of steps I take to prepare for a big presentation.

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The Academic Peer Review Process in a Nutshell

The peer review process is an integral part of academics.  Professors are told to “publish or perish” and they must do so in highly regarded peer review journals to demonstrate the importance of their work.  In order to get published in one of these prestigious journals they must make their way through a grueling gauntlet called the peer review process that looks something like this:

1. Read through a complicated set of instructions for authors and conform to unique and obscure formatting requirements that resemble the awful “Turabian” guidelines that keep hundreds of thousands of students from completing their thesis on time each year.  [I wonder what the cost of Turabian is to annual GDP?]

2. Submit your article in the proper format to the journal editor.  At this point you can add the article to your CV but you have to say “submitted” as part of the citation.

3. Wait several months for a reply.

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Banks are Destroying America’s Neighborhoods Part 2 – Response to Comments

Wow – I never expected that my post about Banks Killing America’s Neighborhoods would attract so many readers.  I want to thank Daniel Roth for highlighting my thoughts on LinkedIn.  I also really appreciate all the comments that were left here on my blog and on the LinkedIn Residential Real Estate discussion board.  I’ll try to respond to a few comments here but I may need a few separate replies to cover all the topics.

1. Several people pointed out that if the banks sold everything at once it would, in fact, drive down prices further.  Of course it would (although I don’t think it would cut prices in half as someone suggested). I didn’t mean to argue otherwise although I think there’s so much inventory being held up that it would take a long time to push it through whether it was all listed at once or not. But, when banks hold on to these properties it is definitely causing the problems I mentioned with deteriorating structures and crime.  I’ve seen it first-hand. So the banks are going to lose money either way – whether they hold on or sell quickly.  Frankly, I think they’d be far better off selling before the houses in their inventory are damaged due to neglect or vandalism.  When a house sits empty for over a year people notice and some will take advantage, often to the detriment of the property.  

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Time to Clean House at Claremont McKenna College

I graduated in 1990 with a BA from Claremont McKenna College, known to those at the Claremont Colleges as CMC. Yes, that’s the college that was recently caught cheating.  CMC reported inflated SAT scores to US News & World Report and other publications who were ranking and profiling liberal arts colleges.

I guess I’m far enough along in life that it won’t really hurt me in any meaningful way but it’s not fun to have your undergraduate degree tarnished. Sort of like having Enron on your resume.

I  read the article in the New York Times and felt very disappointed.  I also received an email from Pamela Gann, the current President of CMC.  It was thoughtful and contrite and made me think the right things were happening.  At the end of her email she stated: “While I am sorry to report this to you, I remain deeply committed to ensuring that Claremont McKenna will respond to this matter in a manner that is accurate, honest, and that will reflect the longstanding integrity of our great college.”

In the NY Times piece it was announced that Richard C. Vos the Dean of Admissions had taken sole responsibility and resigned….so apparently no one else was involved or did anything wrong.  Really?  One scapegoat after 6 years of cheating?  How would Wall Street react if a publicly traded company misrepresented earnings for 6 years and then fired only the CFO and hoped that investors would see this as a sufficient response.

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Spatial is Indeed Special…but GIS Software Skills will Soon be Obsolete

I’m fairly new to the blogosphere and Twitter and most of the other forms of social media so I hope you’ll forgive me for arriving late to the party and digging up relatively old posts.  I read a recent post by James Fee on his Spatially Adjusted blog that referred back to a 2009 blog post arguing that “Spatial is not Special“.  Sorry to be 2.5 years late to comment but if no one else has formed an opposition to this opinion, please allow me to be the first.

If James had titled his post “GIS is not Special”, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to debate, because GIS software is not special, but “spatial” is indeed special.  Here’s why:

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Map of the Best Bargains in Sunshine

In recent blog posts I generated a list of the Top 25 Sunniest US Cities Ranked by Housing Cost and I explained my methodology in another post.  I was waiting on some new features in the MarketSeer web mapping system that we’ve been developing at TerraSeer but now I’m able to prepare a static map to display the best values in sunshine.  Large circles with deeper shades of orange offer the best value in terms of providing the most sunshine for the lowest housing cost.  Click on the map for a larger and easier to read image.

If you’re looking for a deal on sunshine, you just might want to take a close look at cities near the Rio Grande or the Arkansas River or just about anywhere in between.

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The Higher Education Bubble, the Uncollege Movement and My Current Plan for Educating Three Children

A few years ago it occurred to me that college tuition had reached bubble territory.  Why would anyone pay $50,000 per year plus living expenses only to find themselves waiting tables or working as a barista at Starbucks after graduation?  And I don’t mean to imply that there’s something wrong with these jobs – there’s not.  In fact, being a waiter can be a great experience because it teaches sales, customer service, communication and team work.  But why spend 4+ years and $200,000 when the payoff might be a job that pays less than $10 per hour?  At some point tuition reaches heights that forces you to re-evaluate the equation.  I think we reached that point sometime in the past 5-10 years.  When student debt is higher than credit card debt, when almost no one objects to the notion that a college degree is a good pursuit at any price and when it’s too easy to borrow money for college I think we have all the ingredients of a bubble.  Parallels with housing – huge debt to equity ratios, everyone thinks owning a house is the only way to go and banks make it too easy to get a mortgage.

James Altucher does a great job of describing the problems with the current education system and what he considers to be better alternatives – 8 ideas here and 10 more ideas here.  I asked him recently via Twitter if he thought that Community Colleges still represented a good bargain but he replied that community college is a waste of time as well and recommended that I take a look at Uncollege.org.  James is a very smart guy and I can’t disagree with his analysis but something about telling my kids to completely skip college worries me.  James might say that it’s the cultural brainwashing that has taken place over the course of my lifetime.  But what if one of my children wants to become a college professor?  Or what if her dream is be a veterinarian?  What then?  Then she has to go to college, right?  Not everyone can pull off a Zuckerberg, Dell, Gates, or Jobs rise to glory.  What if she doesn’t come to this realization until her mid 20s and by steering her away from college I’ve limited her options or cost her a ton of time?

My oldest is about to turn 12 years old so I have a little time to ponder the options but it will go by in a hurry.  In the meantime I need to figure out how to prepare her for life in a time where Twitter trumps the telephone and I need to be prepared to provide decent guidance when she’s old enough to make her own decisions.  It’s not an easy puzzle to solve but here’s my plan.

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Three Ideas that Might Help Resolve the Housing Crisis

Dear President Obama (and Governor Romney),

I know that you would like to be re-elected (elected) this year and you’ve probably been thinking about how you might improve the economy over the course of the next 8 months to better your chances (or what you would propose to do to stimulate the economy once in office).  One of the biggest problems your administration (the country) has faced is how to resolve the housing crisis.  Well, today is your lucky day because I have 3 suggestions that, in my estimation, would improve the housing situation in the US and provide you with talking points that will appeal to fiscally conservative independent voters around the country.

Here are my 3 ideas:

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