No doubt you noticed that I haven’t posted recently. Actually, if you noticed this, it was probably months ago. So what’s going on?

Well, I’ve had quite a few things competing for my attention. Apart from my regular job, I’ve been working hard on finishing up my MPH in health policy (nearly there!). And I also wrote a book.

Wait? What? A book you say?

Yes! It’s called Carless in Chicago, a guide to living and thriving car-free in the Windy City. It’s due out in a few weeks from Lake Claremont Press. It’s available for preorder from Amazon, and yes of course, it has its own site that just went live today: CarlessInChicago.com. (And you can read an interview with me about the book over at John Greenfield’s Vote With Your Feet blog.)

I’ll be blogging about relevant issues over there, and now that things are a little calmer, I’m going to try and resume a periodic posting schedule here. Most future posts on transit issues will probably end up over there, but things here will probably otherwise remain largely the same, although possibly with a slightly higher percentage of public health and health policy related entries.

To those of you still actually checking this page, thanks for coming back. I hope to have more new material for you soon. (And perhaps an updated design. Could happen.)

Yes, it’s that time again: the British Medical Journal’s annual Christmas issue is out! Highlights this year include features about the biomechanics of and risk of injury from headbanging, an exploration of why Coca Cola shouldn’t be part of your family planning regimen, and an attempt to take that stuck up Florence Nightingale down a notch. Enjoy!

As I’ve taken pains to mention before, I try to keep this blog largely non-political (although when I post about public health issues, that can be especially hard to do). But outside of the blog, I follow politics pretty closely. So when my friend (and former Clintonista) Ben Kirby asked if he could write about our friendly election wager on his excellent blog The Spencerian, I was only too happy to consent. Entries so far: 1, 2, 3.

Sometimes I am so proud to be associated with a fine research institution like UIC. (Via Kottke.)

Dear Jeff,

I meant to write when the Kindle first came out, but you know how these things go. I understand you’re a pretty busy person yourself.

Anyway, for reasons I can’t quite discern, the Kindle’s news coverage has picked up a lot in the last couple of weeks, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to pass on the thoughts that I kept to myself a few months ago.

First off: congratulations. I’m sure you suffered your share of skepticism when pitching Kindle initially, and its success has proved those skeptics wrong. You can hardly keep them in stock, and really, I can’t claim to find that surprising. The device moves ebooks forward several steps, and while I still like settling down with a traditional paper book, I can’t help but feel compelled by what the Kindle has to offer.

And yet, I haven’t ponied up the dough. Amazon didn’t reach its dominance in the market by ignoring customers, so I’m sure you and your team have sat around the table many nights wondering, why? Why hasn’t Jason bought a Kindle yet? Surely, only shyness has kept you from calling to ask, so I’ll save you the effort, and tell you now.

Many people have risen to declare the Kindle the iPod of ebooks. But it isn’t, Jeff. It could be. But it isn’t.

The beauty of the iPod is that while Apple’s DRM may be proprietary, its essential file formats, MP3 and AAC are not. Anyone wishing to produce content for the iPod that takes advantage of its features may do so.

Sadly, you can’t say the same thing about the Kindle. Sure, it supports various other file formats, but its optimal format, the .AZW, remains proprietary. And the Kindle doesn’t support the closest thing we have to a universal format for electronic documents, Adobe’s PDF standard, a published and open standard.

I know what you’re thinking: “Who cares? If people want to read The DaVinci Code, he can buy the AZW from us.” And apart from the fact that I would probably slice open my veins before spending my time reading The DaVinci Code, you may be right. But the truth is, even if I wanted to read The DaVinci Code, I can’t, because I don’t have time.

I know you follow my activities closely Jeff, but perhaps you forget that in addition to everything else I have going on, I’m a par-time graduate student. Every semester, I read somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,000 pages of journal articles, mostly downloaded from the web, mostly in PDF form. And I mostly print them out, because frankly, although it pains me to do so, having paper copies makes it easy for me to carry them around and read them in my spare time, most of which occurs on the train or the X9 bus.

Now, if I could load these PDFs onto the Kindle, that could hold some advantages. But I also know that it would hold some disadvantages as I tried to navigate different numbers of columns and differing layouts.

If only some standard existed for reproducing journal articles for an ebook reader. If only all the major aggregators and independents had some open, published standard that gave them an incentive to add a new format to their downloading options. A standard like .AZW, for example, if it were open and published.

And just think… textbook publishers constantly look for ways to continue charging outrageous sums without having to bear the expense of actually printing books. If only they had such a standard, like an open and published version of the .AZW. (Of course, it would also help Amazon further dominate over college bookstores, but I’m sure you know that.)

But so far, Amazon’s approach seems to turn away what must be one of its largest potential markets: higher ed. Indeed, if .AZW really became a standard for textbooks and journal archives, many colleges and universities might even make the Kindle a required purchase for incoming classes. But even without that incentive, I know many a student who would happily pay a few hundred dollars to make their backs a little less sore, their printing bills a little less high, and their rate of tree destruction a little bit lower.

So, there you have it, Jeff. That’s why, for all its appeal, the Kindle currently sits towards the bottom of my tech wishlist. For me, and many other people who still depend on published materials, the Kindle represents one more thing to carry, rather than a way to carry less.

You’re a sharp guy, Jeff. I’m sure you can figure out a good way to solve this problem. Let me know, okay?

Best,

Jason

With Sunday coming up tomorrow, I realize that nearly a week has passed since this terriffic article by Alex Kotlowitz about Gary Slutkin and CeaseFire Chicago (based at UIC’s School of Public Health) appeared in the New York Times Magazine. A nice write up of important work.

Ugh… another multi-week blogging desert. Why? Well, the holidays for one, general busy-ness for another, not to mention… well, I’ll save that announcement for another day. But let’s just say the busy-ness will continue for a little while yet. In the meantime though, I’m going to try and get back to a slightly more normal posting schedule.

I particularly enjoyed Sean Kean’s article in this weeks New York Times Magazine about how names shift from gender to gender over time. Besides being interesting in its own right, I feel a personal connection to the gendered name issue through my brother, Jandos. Jandos wasn’t always named Jandos. He started life as Jan, and over time, as he became aware of these things (and perhaps thanks in part to the Brady Bunch), he began to feel that as a name, Jan was, well, a little girly. So he sought alternatives, and stumbled upon the name Jandos, which is mostly found in central and eastern Europe.

(Over time, the name continued to evolve a bit in pronunciation, from least affected — Jan-dose — on to Jahn-dose, Yahn-dose, and eventually Yahn-dohsh. About the time we expected it to move to Yahn-dohsh!, it settled back into something approximating plain Jandos, and it has stayed there ever since. Coincidentally, it was probably about the time he married his wife whose name of course is — wait for it — Jan.)

I’ve posted on open source courseware and texts before, but I just ran across a link to Open Text Book, covering open texts in a wide variety of subject areas. Nice blog…

Boing Boing has a great write-up on EpiSurveyor, a fascinating open source epidemiological data collections software that works on mobile phones and PDAs, and uses SMS to send data to a central database, which as you might imagine, just hits so many of my buttons at once. Very nifty.

But I will take issue with one thing: The software seems to be designed with the developing world in mind, and the article mostly references examples falling into that category. But it would be a mistake to overlook applications right here in the U.S. and other industrialized nations. For example, after Hurricane Katrina, Bob Joyce and Balaji Ramadoss, two of my colleagues at other preparedness centers, collaborated to rapidly develop a PDA-based health survey tool to use at the Astrodome in Houston. Volunteers took these surveys to collect health surveillance data, and then brought them back to a central office every evening to download the data. A great idea, and a tool like EpiSurveyor would have made it even easier and faster to deploy.

I’ve been mulling a post about online graphic visualization tools, and I may still write one. But I was impressed today to see that Smashing Magazine has a terrific writeup of tools for creating those most basic of graphic visualizations, charts and graphs. (Via SVN.)

Two years ago, I didn’t use Print Gocco for my New Years cards because much as I love it, the project wasn’t right for the little screen printer. But last year I didn’t make the card I originally intended to make because supplies of Print Gocco supplies had dried up thanks to the announcement that Riso, the manufacturer, was discontinuing production. Like a lot of fans, I was disappointed.

But this weekend’s Consumed column from Rob Walker bring the potential of good news: Riso has heard our pleas, and may reconsider its decision!  I bet my friend Brandy is even happier than I am. Keep your fingers crossed.

I used to post about communications policy (one of my favorite wonky hobby horses) more frequently, and this thoughtful post from Walt Mossberg’s blog put the bug back in me. It’s worth reading, but long story short, it recaps the ridiculously backwards way mobile phones are sold and supported in the United States. Instead of having an open network that is largely equipment agnostic, U.S. consumers typically have to buy phones built specifically for a carrier. Even if one could make a case that consumers might gain advantages from having phones designed to take advantage of a carrier’s strengths, in reality, these phones usually are customized to remove features that carriers don’t like or don’t want to support.

To be fair, the situation isn’t entirely black and white. While customers of CDMA carriers (i.e. Sprint and Verizon) are totally locked in to carrier supported phones, GSM network customers (i.e. those using T-Mobile and AT&T) do have the option of buying unlocked phones free of carrier restrictions. But even in those cases, consumers are a) locked into carrier contracts, and b) have relatively few choices when it comes to finding unlocked phones sold in the U.S. (Nokia is one of the few companies really pushing unlocked handsets here, which is the only reason I was able to easily get my trusty E70.)

In his post, Mossberg reaches back to my childhood and a time when there was only one phone company in this country (AT&T), and you could only buy phone equipment from that company. Can you imagine what our wired phone system would look like today if the government hadn’t stepped in to force this market to become competitive?

Don’t misunderstand me; the regulated monopoly had a couple of advantages. Chiefly, AT&T was mandated to wire as much of the country as possible, without regard to profitability. With their breakup that ended, and hard though it may be for the average blog reader to believe, there are still parts of the country with only basic analog phone equipment, or even no phone lines at all. With mobile phones, there’s really no comparable situation. Instead of a regulated monopoly, we have a divided monopoly, with four major companies making it as difficult as possible for consumers to switch between them.

It’s true that a truly open mobile phone market would probably mean the end of carrier subsidies (i.e. cheap or free phones with a contract), but with the cost of basic phones dropping constantly, it’s hard to imagine that this would create a serious barrier to entry for most consumers. (Check out this $50 Motofone, for example.) Really, the much larger concern is those vast swaths of the country with no wireless signal.

But that’s a rant for another day…

It’s almost as though the editors of Governing Magazine were sitting around a table asking each other, “why hasn’t Jblawg linked to us recently? I was sure we had him with that article last month about adapting to meet the needs of Gen X and Gen Y workforces. Maybe we should do an issue with so many articles he’s interested in, he’ll have to link to us again. Something on pan-flu preparedness, and maybe another piece on communications interoperability. Let’s throw in a piece on municipal wi-fi too; he’s a sucker for that.”

Yep, I bet that’s just how it happened…

I’ve been meaning to link to this since early July: a subway map-inspired web 2.0 trendmap from Japanese firm Information Architects. Gorgeous and functional, it also has links to all kinds of interesting sites you may not have heard of before.

Also in the New York Times this past Sunday was an article by Gina Kolata about statistics about differing ‘average’ numbers of sexual partners between men and women. As she points out, it is mathematically impossible for men and women to have meaningful gaps in their “average” number of sex partners. And she’s right, sort of. As this reply to Kolata by Slate’s Jordan Ellenberg points out, the problem boils down to math illiteracy and linguistics. First, one of Kolata’s examples actually refers to the median number of sex partners, rather than the mean. Secondly, the average non-academic reader of articles on this subject don’t take the word average to mean, well, “mean.” But instead, they take it to mean “typical.” As a pair, these articles provide a good jumping off point for why allegedly objective statistics can be used to make claims that don’t quite make sense or hold together on closer examination.

I’ve recently stumbled across an incredibly sharp, insightful, well-written, and consistently interesting blog about Designing Magazines, which is also the name of the blog writer’s forthcoming book. By a remarkable coincidence, the writer also shares my last name, and my brother’s first name. Weird. But just a coincidence, I’m sure.

(And since I’m engaging in such brazen promotion, I should finally give a shout out to Mike Littman, someone else’s brother, who’s been asking me for a link to his pool cues site for quite awhile now. If I knew anything about billiards, I could say something intelligent about his wares. I can’t. But I can say he’s a good guy.)

I had intended to spend a little quality time late last week putting up a new post or two, but instead, most of my energy got consumed trying to leave Albany, where I was helping to facilitate some training. Thunderstorms, delays, and cancellations kept thwarting our attempts to come home, and it took us a couple of days to finally make it back to Chicago.
Albany natives, and They Might Be Giants, might suggest that our problems stemmed from insufficient respect shown to “The Egg,” a cornerless performance venue built as part of Nelson Rockefeller’s , um, masterpiece of dictatorial-regime-inspired government architecture, the Empire State Plaza. Next time we’ll be more careful.

(With apologies to The Pretenders…)

It was with an odd mix of shock and total lack of surprise that I learned yesterday that my alma mater, Antioch College, plans to shut its doors in 2008. While the trustees talk vaguely about reopening the college in 2012, I know I’m not alone among my fellow alumni in thinking that this is probably the end of the road. (Although current president Steven Lawry tries to sound an optimistic note in this NPR interview, in which he points out that Antioch has closed down before, most recently in 1918.)

Both my brother and I went to Antioch. For me it was a perfectly good choice; for him it was probably closer to a truly life-transforming experience. Although nine years apart, we both missed Antioch’s storied golden era, which started around the time Arthur Morgan introduced the cooperative education program (integrating practical work experience into the curriculum), and drew to a close sometime in the late sixties or early seventies, depending on who’s complaining telling the story.

Still, while Antioch moved from crisis-to-crisis over the next 35 years or so, it remained a unique institution where it was possible to get a really superior education, or if one preferred, to coast by, either through recreation or self-created drama. I’d like to think my experience (and that of my brother) fell into that former category.

At Antioch, I not only had extraordinary learning opportunities through the regular curriculum, but I had amazing experiences through the co-op program, and graduated with a wealth of jobs on my resume including working in a commercial printer, assisting in a neuroimmunology lab, teaching in a small school system, and seeing how the sausage was made in a large one. Like a lot of Antioch students, I left college better prepared for the “real world” than many of my contemporaries who went to higher profile schools.

So what went wrong? Why has Antioch failed to attract and retain enough students? Why have they faltered in their alumni development efforts? Why has it come to this, seemingly with little warning?

Obviously, I don’t have all the answers, but I have a few theories. Most fundamentally, when an institution bases its existence on perpetual experimentation (some Antiochians might call it perpetual revolution, but I won’t be so grandiose), it becomes difficult to to create the sort of generational continuity that lead alumni to both “sell” the school, and invest in its future. This is not to say that the experiments didn’t yield some wonderful results (and spectacular failures); but rather that this continual reinvention made it hard for anyone in the Antioch community to embrace the long view.

I might go so far as to argue that it was this lack of a long view that caused so many generations of students to disrespect the campus and the larger Antioch experience that it represented. Intentionally or not, the signal to students, and particularly to alumni, was that the school itself wasn’t worth caring about. (Talk to anyone who’s visited the campus over the last few years, and you’ll hear about the Union, which seems to represent this issue for so many people.)

I could go on. I could mention Antioch’s self-injurious acceptance of mediocrity in critical support functions like co-op administration, alumni development, and recruiting. I could mention the misplaced campus redevelopment priorities. And I could mention that in search of tuition dollars, the college probably accepted a few too many students who attended on “keep away” money. But I think those illustrations mostly offer examples of symptoms to the underlying problems.

I hope that Antioch will re-open, even if I’m not hopeful that it will happen. But if the Board of Trustees seriously intends to pursue this goal, I would urge them to engage the alumni community. Maybe this is an opportunity to finally build that long view; for so many of us feel its absence.

(And they should hire an army of Joe Cali clones. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.)

I’ve spent a lot of time recently learning more about geo tools, primarily in the context of my Web 2.0 and Public Health presentation. Well, this week sees a cornucopia of new geo tools released into the wild, all in conjunction with the Where 2.0 conference. A few highlights:

Swivel G: new mapping tools in Swivel, the nifty data sharing and visualization site about which I’ve blogged before.

GeoCommons: a treasure trove of free geo data and mapping tools, including community data sharing and publishing.

GeoPress: a plugin to make WordPress blogs location-aware (as shown in this very post).

More good stuff to come as the conference progresses, I expect.