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tl;dr: Dear Planning Board: I support SDP-14-073, the site development plan for Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods, and you should too. (signed) Frank As previously noted by Bill Woodcock and Julia McCready, tonight (Thursday, November 6 at 7 pm) is the meeting [PDF] of the Howard County Planning Board to consider (among other things) SDP-14-073, the site development plan for Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods, otherwise known as the Inner Arbor plan, as submitted by the Inner Arbor Trust. I hope to be able to be at the meeting to express my support of the plan, but just in case I’m not able to do that I also submitted written testimony to the Planning Board earlier today, as follows: ...

tl;dr: Tom Coale deserves our thanks for showing us the best aspects of politics, in a world in which we so often see the worst. Dear Tom, True to your nature, I see you’ve already blogged about the election results yesterday and given us your thoughts on what was a hard-fought but ultimately unsuccessful effort in District 9B. I can’t let your post go without one of my own. I don’t for a moment regret my endorsement of you, and in particular I don’t regret the investment I made in your campaign through my donations. I felt they were an excellent investment in a campaign that by all indications was professionally run, focused on issues that matter to the people of Ellicott City, positive in all its aspects, and (most important) featured a candidate who was tireless in reaching out to his potential constituents, listening to their opinions, and promoting a practical vision for governing. ...

tl;dr: Before Howard County’s next county executive goes off on a high-profile “open government data” initiative, they (and we) should think more about what such a project can and can’t do, and how best to make it successful. Among their other policy proposals, both candidates for Howard County Executive have proposed new initiatives to make data about the workings of county government more available to residents. Allan Kittleman has promoted what he calls “HoCoStat,” a “platform to hold government accountable” that “will link data to long-term impacts” and “measure . . . response and process times for various government functions.” Courtney Watson’s corresponding initiative doesn’t have a catchy name, but her “open government” vision includes a promise to “leverage technology to improve and maintain government transparency, efficiency and communication” by creating “an intuitive and interactive web portal that provides public access to information in usable and searchable formats.” ...

tl;dr: Vote for Tom Coale for Maryland House of Delegates, District 9B. Before I publish my main post for today, a brief public service announcement: If you live in District 9B and haven’t yet voted, please consider giving Tom Coale your vote for Delegate. For the most part this is a nonpartisan blog, and I have a pretty strict policy of not endorsing candidates for office, even for nonpartisan positions like those on the Board of Education. The only exception I’ve ever made (and likely ever will make) is for Tom. I think he would make a great representative for the people of Ellicott City; my only regret is that I live across US 40 from District 9B and can’t vote for him. (Although if Tom wins this election and performs at the level I think he’s capable of, I think in future I and a lot of other people will in fact get our chance to elect him to something else.)

Frank Winter (John Benjamin Hickey) and Charlie Isaacs (Ashley Zuckerman), physicist protagonists of the WGN America television series Manhattan tl;dr: Manhattan is a quality TV show about the people racing to build an atomic bomb, and their families. It’s well worth watching, but you’ll enjoy it more if you remember you’re not tuned to the History Channel. ...

Following up from my previous post on my experience with Coursera, here are a few links of interest (mostly) relating to online education, with a focus on “competency-based education,” i.e., education directed specifically at teaching people to become competent at one or more tasks or disciplines: “Hire Education: Mastery, Modularization, and the Workforce Revolution” (Michelle Weise and Clayton Christensen). Clayton Christensen is famous for his theory of “disruptive innovation,” which I think is useful not so much as a proven theory but rather as a way to structure plausible narratives about business success or failure. When Christensen fails in his predictions it’s usually because he doesn’t pay attention to things that don’t fit neatly into his preferred narratives. For example, he and co-author Michael Horn previously hyped for-profit education companies and failed to see that for many of them actually educating students was not the point. Rather those companies identified a “head I win, tails you lose” business proposition in “chasing Title IV money [i.e., government-subsidized student loans] in a federal financial aid system ripe for gaming.” This represents a second try by Christensen and his associates to forecast the future of post-secondary education. ...

The last three months or so I’ve been in school (which is why I haven’t been posting as much lately). Not a real bricks-and-mortar school—I’ve been participating in the “Data Science Specialization” series of online courses created by faculty at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and offered by Coursera, a startup in the online education space. It’s been an interesting experience, and well worth a blog post. The obvious first question is, why I am doing this? Mainly because I thought it would be fun. I was an applied mathematics (and physics) major in college, enjoyed the courses I had in probability, statistics, stochastic processes, etc., and wanted to revisit what I had learned and (for the most part) forgotten. It’s one of my hobbies—a (bit) more active one than watching TV or reading. Also, I’ve done some minor fiddling about with statistics on the blog (for example, looking at Howard County election data), am thinking about doing some more in the future, and wanted to have a better grounding in how best to do this. Finally, “data scientist” is one of the most hyped job categories in the last few years, and even though I probably won’t have much occasion to use this stuff in my current job it certainly can’t hurt to learn new skills in anticipation of future jobs. ...

Last week I cancelled my subscription to the eMusic digital music service, a subscription I paid for faithfully for over ten years. I spent a few years of my blogging life writing about eMusic as a subscriber, so it’s appropriate to mark the end of my subscription with one final post. eMusic has gone through many business models over the years, but at the time I joined it was a would-be solution for people who wanted to listen to lots of music, especially music out of the mainstream, but had only a limited budget to pay for it. Operating in the post-Napster era, eMusic focused on people who wanted to download tracks and albums as MP3 files, and would commit to pay at least $10 a month for the privilege. Initially the service allowed “unlimited” downloads for one fixed price. This was after the major music labels had sued Napster into submission for offering a similar service at no charge (and without authorization by copyright holders, of course), so even with the promise of payment no major labels were willing to sign up. The offering was thus limited to independent music labels, and even then much of the music available was only marginally appealing (to put it politely). ...

Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend the Columbia Association board meeting this evening. Here are the remarks I had planned to make during the speak-out portion of the meeting; if anyone else wants to crib from these for their own remarks please feel free to do so: I have two points I wanted to make tonight: First, I have not seen the language of the Inner Arbor Trust easement, and am not qualified to comment on legal issues relating to the easement. However I have read pretty much every public source of information I could find relating to the various proposals for Symphony Woods, and everything I’ve read indicates that the Columbia Association has been accepting of the actions taken by the Inner Arbor Trust since its creation. That includes in particular the Trust’s decision to leverage the work already done by CA as part of the county planning process, and concentrate first on developing the part of Symphony Woods covered by the current Inner Arbor plan—a plan whose elements are those contained in the original CA-submitted Final Development Plan, including an amphitheater, café, play area, and so on. There is nothing in the public record to indicate that the Inner Arbor Trust was ever acting in violation of the easement as far as CA was concerned. If the current CA board is determined to test the issue in court I believe that the private record of dealings between CA and the Inner Arbor Trust will also show this to be the case. ...

The Chrysalis in Symphony Woods / Merriweather Park in the Inner Arbor plan. (Click for high-resolution version.) Image © 2013 Inner Arbor Trust; used with permission. Marc Fornes, the designer of the Chrysalis, the amphitheater planned for Symphony Woods as part of the Inner Arbor plan, and his firm THEVERYMANY are one of two winners of the 2014 WAN 21 for 21 award sponsored by World Architecture News, “an initiative aiming to highlight 21 architects who could be the leading lights of architecture in the 21st century.” ...