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About a month ago we got some new neighbors in the house next door to us. It was vacant for a month while the owner located a new renter. We found out that the couple that moved in was recently engaged, newly transplanted from Savannah and had a huge English Mastiff named Che. About a week after they moved in we had the chance to put Che and Mali in the yard together for a play date. Mali seemed uninterested as did Che, but it gave me the chance to get up close to the second biggest of our new neighbors.

Mali is a constantly questioned mix of multiple breeds while Che is pedigree. Mali is quick and energetic, Che is big and conservative with his energy. Mali weighs less than 50 pounds and Che’s up into 3 figures. Though over the course of the last few weeks Che has been losing weight; a sign that, despite his size, he was vulnerable. On Sunday we left for brunch at a friend’s and came home to fins that Che had passed away at the young age of two years.

We found out that Che had many problems stemming from his incestuous bloodline. He suffered seizures and his owners had been advised to put him down earlier. On Sunday they put him down (into the ground). They buried him in the backyard near our fence line.

I should back up a bit. We found out about all this via an email from our neighbor on the other side. He said that he saw the huge hole in the ground and saw them carry the body out and cover it. Sure enough when we went out to check it out there was a large spot of Georgia red clay turned up with a cross made from two sticks stuck in it and a tennis ball resting upon it. When we first heard this we couldn’t believe this was happening (and we wondered what their landlord thought). Lauren talked to them today and got the whole story. It’s hard not to feel bad for them, but at the same time I think that logistically they handled this poorly. I am nervous about the large dead animal buried in the yard next door. They told us they’re keeping an eye on, watching and sniffing for signs of anything exhumed. Luckily we’ve had about two days of slow rain. Here is the relevant section of the Atlanta Municipal Ordinance.

Sec. 18-2. Removal of carcasses of small animals.
(a) Authority. The director, bureau of sanitary services shall deliver to the city dumping grounds the carcasses of small animals, such as sheep, dogs and the like.
(b) Notice of death, existence of carcass. Any person owning the carcass of any small animal or any person on whose premises a small animal should die or be found dead, within three hours of its death or the discovery thereof, shall notify the sanitation inspector of the district wherein the dead animal may be found or the director, bureau of sanitation services of the location of the animal, unless the owner within that time shall remove or cause or procure the removal of the carcass to a place designated by the director, bureau of sanitation services.
(c) Charges established. Any collection or disposal of dead animal carcass received from private agencies providing care and treatment to animals shall be accompanied by payment of the required fee, which shall cover the cost of such service to be rendered.
(d) Determination of amounts. The rates referred to in subsection (c) of this section shall be determined annually by the commissioner of public works and shall be based on the current cost of collection and disposal of dead animals. A schedule of the charges shall be filed with the municipal clerk by the commissioner of public works not later than the second week following adoption of the annual budget and shall be made effective January 1 of each year.
(e) Payment. Payment of collection and disposal shall be made by coupons purchased from the city before the dead animal is collected and transported to the disposal facility.
(Code 1977, § 14-4017)
Cross references: Municipal solid waste collection and disposal system, § 130-36 et seq.

Sec. 18-3. Disposal of carcasses of large animals.
The police chief or the director, bureau of sanitary services, upon becoming informed of any dead horse, mule, cow or other large animal within the city limits, shall cause the carcass to be properly buried or disposed of so as not to create a nuisance. No person other than those employed to do so shall remove the carcass of the animal, provided that the owner or the owner’s authorized agent may remove the carcass from the city under the direction of a sanitation inspector, but no one other than a sanitation inspector shall bury the animal within the city limits.
(Code 1977, § 14-4018)

I’m not sure what do to, but I will keep you posted. In any event, peace be with you Che.

Today I walked up to Jazzman’s at Rollins to find a new hot pink sign glaring me in the face. It promoted an idea that had come to mind before and hence I thought was long overdue. I mean if I can come up with it then someone else surely should have awhile ago. It said that patrons that buy coffe and provide their own mug would receive $0.15 off the regular price. This is a great strategy to reduce waste from the operation, but when I asked what made them start this they could only say that it was for the same reason that they started using the frequent combo cards (buy 8 get one free). The cards are actually extra paper that ends up in the garbage so I figured that they do these things to make more money, by getting people to come back over and over in the latter case and by saving the cost of cup they would otherwise go through faster. Interestingly it seems the cost of cups is what is really driving this change, since everyone knows coffee (water) is basically free around here and prices don’t shift even during severe shortage, such as the one we have now.

Georgia Tech’s highlights are certainly focused on water. The first has been around for awhile and is worth noting again. That is, the flushless/waterless urinals in many on the men’s bathrooms on campus. The second is a bit newer and more subtle and that is the new faucet heads on all the sinks. Now the water comes out of the sinks more like a watering can than an open hose. I first noticed this strategy last weekend at the cabin when everytime I went to the kitchen sink the water came out in this ‘shower’ fashion as opposed to the ‘cylinder’ of H2O to which I have become accustomed. I must say it works. If you want proof you need only try to fill a water bottle. You’ll notice that it takes significantly longer to fill the volume. So in the brief seconds you need to get handwashing water you’re not losing as much water down the drain. Well done engineers.

I am not good at keeping up with politics. I picked up the New York Times today and learned more about Johnny Greenwood’s classical composition for strings than the results of Michigan’s primary. I like to watch results but know little about what’s going on behind it all. If you want to read a review of the Democratic race that is considerably well researched I recommend this from Ben and Katy.

One of the first questions I have about the whole political game is what is the difference between the primary and a caucus and why do we have them. I guess that a caucus is a meeting that you are invited to by the party at which you choose who you want to support, while a primary is an actual election. But why do we let the people of Iowa and New Hampshire make early decisions that have important effects for us all? I am not so sure that the populations of the two are representative of the rest of the country. In terms of race/ethnicity they certainly are different from the US composition. They are both far more white and less everything else, especially Latino. This also includes foreign born persons and immigration is an issue of the day. New Hampshire also seems significantly better educated and wealthier than most of the US. However even if they were right on the averages of the US, that is not a reason to have them choose which candidates we’ll ultimately have a choice on.

I would do some more research but like I said I am not good at (interested in) all things political. I AM American enough to state that this is exactly what’s wrong with this country.

Iowa’s Stats

New Hampshire’s Stats

My New Year’s Resoultion is 1280 x 960.

I know it’s already the 11th but now is as good a time as any to make my intentions for the new year known. I thought long and hard about some of these and since October wrote down some of the best actions I could take in 2008 to improve my condition in the world.

First and most important on the list was my resolution to stop farting near/around Lauren. It started horribly with a real loungefest in front of a football-filled tv on New Year’s Day, but when I saw that she would help hold me to my commitment I really made the change. I was/am dissappointed that I tried to get away with it for awhile but now I am making real progress. Even though this only applies to Lauren it is disappointing that neither her or anyone else notices my efforts. It is like some many other horrible things the world has endured; we only notice them when we are forced to deal with them and do not comment on our delight of their absence as often as we should. I’m glad that Khmer Rouge is gone forever. It works the other way for things of beauty and grace; in their absence we long for their presence. MLK, wish you were here.

My second resoultion strays from the ethic of the whole practice but I like it. I plan to use the phrase “my wife works in __________” to reinforce my opinions/knowledge of certain topics. I will only use this in casual settings, and obviously it will only work on those who do not Lauren and for jobs that she could fill. Nobody is going to buy “My wife plays in the NFL”, but “my wife works in the Falcon’s front office” might help others form a little trust in the trade rumors I start spreading. Of course telling all of you hurts the efficacy of this ruse but I will still find my opportunities.

Thirdly, I would like to change the way I eat. This stared out as a goal to eat seasonally even though I hardly know what that means. The idea was that seasonal foods would be fresher, grow outside naturally, come from places nearer to where I eat and hence require less energy to produce and to get them to me. It has expanded into considering more vegetarian options. This requires less knowledge than the eating seasonal thing. I guess I’m trying all this in an effort to ease my personal impact on the ecology of the planet. This has to do with the energy, land, and the other food required to raise animals for food. Getting away from the huge animals, like cow, are the easist way to make a dent in that food production bar of the graph.

Email me (or Lauren in the case of #1) to find out how we progress as 2008 continues. Happy New Year!

What food is in season (in the UK) now
Seasonal Food Calendar (UK)
The Cheeseburger Footprint

WE GOT HIM!!!!!

We tried some tuna bait outside and attracted another cat but I went out to look one more time and saw him creeping into the crawlspace of the house nextdoor. He didn’t come home but we found him.

Here we come 2008!

Sometimes I think there could be an entire blog about my neighborhood, if only seen through the right lens. It’s at those same times I hope I am carrying a camera. It might be there and gone or something static and I’ll have a chance to go back and snap a shot. Last week presented one such opportunity and I took full advantage.

This shot was taken at the church on the corner two blocks from my house. It’s about that time of year when everyone goes through the chore of cleaning up the leaves in the yard (it took em awhile but they finally fell off). Most people use the heavy-duty brown paper bags which you can buy at the hardware store. The city comes around once every other week and picks up the yard waste. The church decided to take a different approach. Maybe they didn’t want to spend money on the bags from the hardware store but the bags they ultimately chose seem like they would be even harder to get your hands on. What’s more, they chose bags that no one would pick up without thinking twice.
I’m happy to report that the bags were picked up, though I am not by whom or when.

School is now over but I thought I would give you a taste of one last assignment. It was about measuring walkability on street segments. All of the segments were around homes of students in the class and two students rated each segment. The segments were initially rated using Walkscore.com but it is mostly based on crow-fly proximity to businesses so it doesn’t say anything about walkability (for example how pleasurable it is to walk on the segment). The only real outcome we could obtain from the assessment tool that we used was a rating of the other pedestrians on the segment. We turned it into a presence/absence indicator and found that the number of land uses on a segment as well as a higher rating of the segment’s sidewalk quality and interesting sights all increased the odds of observing pedestrians on a segment. It was a first look at some rough data but the results are not too unbelievable. We even controlled for median income, auto ownership, age of the neighborhood and density.

But why look at that? Is walking to the store or a bus stop really physical activity? I have a hard time convincing myself of that sometimes. Regardless educating people about what IS physical activity and how they can fit it in their lives is something that is talked about a lot in the field. I found this graphic (originally published in the New York times Magazine with an article about France’s jogging President) to be very interesting. I think it is getting at the point that information about a behavior like physical activity can affect an individuals’ behaviors. There was not much more than this graphic and it didn’t fit with the article exactly but judging by the metrics and the jogging part of the piece I think that’s what they’re talking about. If I find more I will let you know but take a look it’s really interesting. One thing I wonder about is why is the ‘informed’ group skinnier than the control at time 1?

In an effort to increase public health awareness around anthrax as well as show off some of my classmates’ work, I’ve offered this space to Micah (a classmate). Here she is with a guest post.

So as Jason said, we had an assignment for our Toxicology class to make a video about a toxic exposure of some kind. My group (me and my main peep, Kim) chose to do the 2001 USPS Anthrax attacks. While the assignment was more synapse-stimulating than a paper or an exam, we spent significantly more time on the creation of this video. Coming up with the idea for the creative genius you see before you took a good day or so, and the “hours” of footage (aka, 2 minutes of good film and about 80 of us laughing) took another good chunk of time. iMovie is a horrible creation unless you have vargo there for inspirational words and to show you how to do anything cool, and the walk to the video lab at school seemed farther and farther away every time we went. All in all, it was fun to complain about during the ordeal, but we didn’t kill each other and who knows who might see this thing on this widely-read public domain. Anybody hiring?

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=9028634942451066680&hl=en

Sometimes my own understanding of where I am in life and who I am can seem really off. I think I’m in one place and acting a certain way and then I catch a glimpse of myself from another angle and I see of myself in a completely different light.

Grad school can be like that. Everyone is idealistic and determined and at the same time sick of it and fed up. And even though we’re in our 20s sometimes we act really childish but we still feel like we’re qualified to handle really big problems. If you’re in the middle of it you may not even notice what you’re doing. Plus we hardly have time to reflect on our work (if we get it back). Sometimes you get to put your work in front of people and then it becomes a good lens or perhaps a mirror in which to see yourself.

In my efforts to work on the really big problems that grad school presents (assignments) this is the latest creation of which I was a part. It’s a mock newscast about a toxic exposure, in this case tetrodotoxin. Enjoy.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8255090133169770103&hl=en

The end of my semester is here and I am semi-swamped with little pieces of things to get done. I also find myself running constantly to another meeting. I was telling someone earlier today (while looking for a bright spot) that I like this time of the year as I get to cross so many things off my to do list. Of course getting them done and handing in quality work are not equivalent. Regardless I haven’t found too many of my peers eager to share in my optimism.

As I have been away for the blog for a bit I thought I could at least share with you some of my work. For a Anthropological Perspectives on Global Health assignment I read a book and wrote a reaction paper. Here is a summary of the book, I’ll spare you the reaction so as you can have your own. If it sparks your interest, follow the link at the bottom to buy it, or find me and you can borrow.

The cover of Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott features a z-shaped double bend in an empty road with little else around it except for meticulously manicured fields. The jog in the road is a systematic blip in an otherwise uniform grid of roads that have been laid out to define six-square-mile townships in North Dakota. The roads follow lines of longitude and are forced to dogleg every twenty-four miles in order to keep with the decreasing distance between longitudinal lines as they continue north. Initially, the photo seems an unimportant adornment on an otherwise detailed work of analysis, however once you have read the text this choice of photo becomes much clearer.

In the text, Scott points out the methods which states have used to simplify, control, standardize, manage, and manipulate complex and diverse systems; first in nature and eventually in social environments. Scott begins with the example of a managed forest in which specific characteristics of the forest (perhaps specific to a type of tree), for example growth rate/yield, are recorded, monitored, and managed so that over time the forest is changed to take on those characteristics that its managers have favored. He views this as an oversimplification of the complex system that is the forest and points out some of the flaws and vulnerabilities it exposes.

Having exhibited control of the ‘wild’ natural forest the management of inhabited land followed. Scott argues that similar simplifications and standardizations, most influentially with the cadastral maps, were a necessary part of modern statehood and important in colonization. Maps were developed so that the state could quickly survey lands for the enumeration and location of population, wealth, and resources allowing those in charge to act strategically to influence ownership and to ultimately impose their own values. The influence was increased though the use of standardized systems of measurement, languages and surnames. More importantly, Scott shows that as officials of these modern states assessed life as a series of categorizations they were removed, to some degree, from the society they governed.

Scott carries his analysis from the formation of modern states to larger social and philosophical movement of High Modernism. Here he explains some of the more extreme authoritarian views on using the new science of the day to manage people as well as place. In High Modernism, an understanding of administrative ordering of nature and society is assumed to be an entitlement to such duties. Proponents of such radicalism proposed a comprehensive rational engineering of all aspects of social life in order to improve the human condition. It is typified by a top-down structure, the rejection of the past as a model upon which to build and is influenced by the military mobilization of World War I. The technocratic nature of High Modernism brings with it an incredible hubris. This is amplified in the circumstance of colonization where visionaries of the day were less constrained to carry out grand schemes and the chasm of cultural knowledge was even greater. Here Scott points out the failures of High Modernist agriculture and ‘villagization’ in Africa.

Seeing Like a State