10.18.11 Occupy Cleveland needs a permit for Willard Park and for Public Square.   Downtown Cleveland Alliance needs access for Xmas decor. Right.

Christmas in Cleveland will be hard for many.

But some have shelter, colored with red, white, and green.

The FREE STAMP is a negative, as is much of Cleveland.

Thanks to Crain’s for bringing this into the light. 

Fools rush in -  if you are for a sales tax to build a con center and kennedy mart - you honestly believe that this will trickle down and improve the NEO economy - then you should READ the resolutions (sales tax, use tax) passed by Cuyahoga County Commissioners Hagan and Dimora.  Look at the second line of either resolution.  "money goes into general fund".   There is no language in the resoluions that says that either the sales or use tax is for a  con center and kennedy mart.  This tax will go on for 20 years sucking in about a million a week.  Where will Hagan and Dimora be in 2008 when their terms expire?  Promises, Promises.  Printed in the Plain Dealer.

And Commissioner Peter Lawson Jones, who voted "against" the tax is in fact complicit.  If he was really against the tax but for a con center (with support from hotel bed taxes as he said) Mr. Jones would have raised in the public hearings the fact that the resolutions were for money going into the general fund, not into a con center account.  Omitting to exercise this ringing argument puts Mr. Jones in a catagory of strong doubt about being "against" the tax.

So, if you REALLY want a concenter and kenmart you would do well to sign a referendum petition right away to help putitontheballot.com this spring.  Then you can vote the present resolutions down, and insist that the Commissioners introduce and pass   new resolutions which spell out specifically in the resolutions what the sales tax will be used for. 

But then again, maybe you were born yesterday. 

Ever wondered how a designer conceives a product? What the process involves? Top CIA graduates innovating products for corporations such as Chrysler, Hyundai, Hasbro and Kyocera will open the vault, displaying sketches, concept drawings, renderings and actual consumer products at the second-annual Design Values alumni exhibition at CIA’s FUTURE Center for Design and Technology Transfer, June 1—August 3, 2007.

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I recently posted on realneo about a report I saw on CNN profiling Lucien Gambarota, an inventor in Hong Kong who has developed and begun manufacturing micro wind turbines - see http://realneo.org/Micro-Wind-Turbines. He is also working on technologies to capture energy from waves, and hybrids of wind and wave.

While not currently a powerhouse in Free Open Source Software (FOSS), Northeast Ohio is positioned to begin excelling with FOSS in some very strategic ways that may add great value to the regional economy. 

Because of FOSS, we may now bridge the digital divide more quickly and completely here than has any other large urban center in America, we may soon have the highest percentage of workforce properly educated for the new economy, and we may lead the world in some fields of application development and technology innovation with global, open standards, all if the region now embraces FOSS..

I received an informative email this afternoon from Richard McDougald Enty, Planning Team Leader, Programming & Planning Department, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, about some of their Transit Oriented Development initiatives and vision. It is very exciting to see this as an active subject for discussion and planning here. I am a strong supporter of Transit Oriented Development and consider it the core foundation on which we should rebuild the City of Cleveland and surrounding suburbs.  Here is the vision from RTA:

A snippet from Palm Beach Post on organic juice sales.   Though I consume it in tandem with organic milk, organic juice availability just has not kept pace.   Looks like they finally are waking up in the Orange belt.  Tropica (worlds largest juice guru) only got into the game this Feb.   See how behind the ball the big boys can be.   Looks like it wont be much longer now.  I wonder what is next? 

Look here to read the Buffalo News and their Feb 21, 2007 article on the 8 Clipper turbines which are going into the defunct Bethlehem Steel slag dump in Lackawanna, just west of downtown Buffalo.  The blades are made in Brazil,

This was tucked away in the Cleveland Plain Dealer Business section today, straight out of Associated Press, without any local perspective - yawn, how boring is this subject. Well, over the next few months expect to see it is not so boring!

 

Thanks to Susan Miller for pointing out an important article in the 02/03/07 Plain Dealer regarding the war to eliminate lead poisoning in our region by 2010 - an outlandishly aggressive objective, as Cleveland ranks among the top five cities nationally for lead poisoning. In 2004, St. Luke's Foundation funded what has been the most important collaboration ever for the future of Northeast Ohio: the Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council (GCLAC), aligning over 80 agencies and organizations at local, regional, state and federal levels toward the common objective of lead eradication in our region within the next three years. On February 1, 2007, St. Luke's brought together the leadership of many other foundations for the expressed purpose of convincing as many foundations as possible to join them in funding the next three years of GCLAC initiative. The article states the objective of raising $3 million from foundations to leverage for far greater support from government sources.

 

Thanks to an anonymous donor, East Cleveland has received some excellent equipment to start setting up a pilot proof of concept wireless broadband mesh network in some part of the city - location to be determined. The donated equipment is from a similar proof of concept deployment in Washington, D.C., and includes several commercial wifi antennas and routers and cabling to set up a small multipoint demonstration network, running the open source CUWiNWare mesh application and wifiDOG contained portal application, all routing to the city of East Cleveland's open source Drupal community portal, at http://eastcleveland.org. All this, combined with other digital divide bridge programs there, makes East Cleveland approaches to information technology some of the most interesting in America.

Your opinions and feedback are important! Attend this Public Open House to Learn About the Next Steps for the Cleveland Innerbelt Plan. The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) invites you to attend a Public Open House to review the Recommended Preferred Alternative. ODOT officials and their consultants will be available to answer questions.

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Re: Formal request to get your answer to the questions of : WILL CLEVELAND CITY COUNCIL DEMAND THAT ODOT CONDUCT A VALID ENGINEERING STUDY AND ECONOMIC IMPACT STUDY TO COMPARE THE COSTS, FEASIBILITY, AND TRAFFIC INTERRUPTIONS FOR THE NORTHERN AND ORIGINAL SOUTHERN BRIDGE ALIGNMENT ALTERNATIVES?

 

Attend this lecture, the Distinguished Law and Technology Lecture, Case Western Reserve University School of Law, in person or through WEBCAST LIVE. Robert P. George, Princeton University, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University is a memeber of the President's Council on Bioethics. He previously served as a presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and as a Judicial Fellow at the U.S. Supreme Court, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. Professor George is author of Making Men Moral: civil Liberties and Public Morality (1993) and In Defense of Natural Law (1999). His most recent books are The Meaning of Marriage, edited with Jean Berthke Elshtain and The Clash of Orthodoxies. Professor George's articles and review essays have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the Review of Politics, the Review of Metaphysics, and the American Journal of Juriprudence. He has received numerous awards, including the 2005 Bradley Prize for Intellectual and Civic Achievement. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on several boards of directors.In addition, he is of council to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee.

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Thanks to Ed Morrison for sending over a link to an interesting analysis of the value of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) for European businesses and society. From the article: "European companies are saving a lot of money on software investment and development, due to the existence and emergence of open-source software, a Commission-funded study finds." An especially interesting observation is that "The bigger a company is, the more likely it is to use FLOSS." I wonder how NEO stacks up in the FLOSS world - use of FLOSS in business and government... training of FLOSS programmers and administrators... marketing and purchasing of FLOSS solutions in the region... number of FLOSS professionals and firms deploying FLOSS solutions? Read more about this movement in Europe below...

Three articles in the Sunday, January 14, 2007, Cleveland Plain Dealer really caught my attention. 1. "Power shifts, and a fast-track bill is derailed"; 2. "Gloomy forecast" and 3. "Lost confidence in Bush? So has he"  - especially the last one, where Elizabeth Auster writes, about President Bush, that "he now seems shaken by the prospect that his vision of a free and stable Iraq may be fading along with his power to achieve much else." Because of this, despite "Gloomy forecast", I expect most important aspects of the Cleveland, Northeast Ohio, Ohio, US and global economy to improve dramatically over the next 2, 4 and 10 years. In fact, I can't think of an area where there won't be significant improvements. Think of the growth I expect like when an economy is freed from a dictatorship and people are allowed to be free and thrive - markets open up - that is America, now that Bush has been replaced by democracy.

At the recent Green Affordable Housing discussion held at Cleveland Institute of Art, in association with their Home House Exhibit, Cleveland Planning Director Bob Brown stated that Cleveland needs to see more older properties renovated - we have many great old buildings, they add character and quality to our community, and that is the most environmentally sound strategy. Typically, much more energy is conserved by saving an old building than may be saved by building a new building, even if very energy efficient, because the energy required for creating and constructing all the material of a new building is the greatest factor in overall environmental impact, even when factored over a very long time period. So it is very good news for Cleveland and the environment that, just before leaving office for good, Governor Talf signed Sub HB 149 into law, providing critical tax incentives for the redevelopment of historic buildings in older cities and towns. A priority for NEO economic development strategy should including identifying important properties the community would like to see saved and move them on track to take advantage of these tax benefits - make sure as many of the 100 annual statewide projects are NEO project as is possible.

Cleveland attorney Richard  Herman sent me an outstanding analysis (posted below) of a Duke University study released on January 4, 2007, which is attached to this posting and "concludes that foreign-born entrepreneurs were founders of over 25% of the technology and engineering companies started from 1995 to 2005," and surfaces that "Only 14% of Ohio's tech companies were founded by immigrants, well below the national average." "The study further found that Indians have founded more engineering and technology companies in the U .S. in the past decade than immigrants from U.K, China, Taiwan and Japan combined.  26% of all immigrant-founded companies have Indian founders." "Similarly, the study found that Ohio was successful in attracting only 1% of the Indian tech entrepreneurs and only 5% of the UK tech entrepreneurs." Richard offers three excellent suggestions for addressing this problem, and you should read those and his entire Economic Development Advisory and the attached report below.