Where Should the Cast of Jersey Shore Party Next?

For whatever it's worth, I think Jersey Shore, for as trashy and lame its storyline is, is able to provoke nearly everyone in some way. As the most ridiculous logical extension of reality TV culture yet, it's symbolic of our pop culture, for better or worse. Whether out of schadenfreude or just plain morbid curiosity, you're fooling yourself if you haven't at least heard of the show within the past two years.

Snooki already has a book out. Apparently one of its best lines is Snooki describing "feeling like a bunch of Ellis Island immigrants stepping off the Mayflower..." So in other words, the same feeling you get the morning after you take a shot of Jager mixed with Four Loko and then chase it with a Vicodin? Followed by much fist-pumping action!

So far the show has taken its brave contestants from the decayed decadence of the Jersey Shore to the (juiced!) locales of Miami Beach. Next season will be in Italy - bring these guidos back to black out the old country, shall we?

This brings us to the question of where their next party destination should be for the following season. Time had a great run-down of possible locations:

1. Rimini, Italy:

It would be fun to send the group to Corelone, Sicily to escape the repercussions of their crazy shenanigans at Seaside Heights – aka the town Michael Corelone in The Godfather was exiled to after his restaurant shoot-em-up. But, sending an Italian with mainland heritage to stay on the island is almost equal to blasphemy.

Located near the Adriatic Sea for that must-have tanning time, Rimini’s got tons of discos to replace Karma. Oh yeah and there’s many monuments including the Tiberius Bridge and the Church of San Giuliano Martire to give them a taste of the real Italy because that’s the reason you watch Jersey Shore - for the culture.

2. Ibiza, Spain

Everyone knows that Ibiza is the party capital of Europe and, some might argue, the world. The place where fist-pumping electronic music lives and breathes, Ibiza has featured some of the world’s top techno, house and trance DJs – and hopefully soon DJ Pauly D. That mandatory Spanish siesta can only help this group to keep going strong on Ron Ron Juice into the wee hours of the morning.

Not only is Ibiza full of some of the world's largest (and douchiest) nightclubs - see, for instance, the annual 10,000 person foam party at Privilege. It is also home to world-class beaches, beautiful Mediterranean coastline, friendly locals, and my 21st birthday bender. See Facebook evidence below.

Even their graffiti is sexy

Pacha - this is an off-season off-night at one of the most famous clubs in Ibiza

 3. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The girls in the house, who already wear skimpy clothing that sometimes doesn’t even cover their nether regions, will feel at home in Rio De Janiero. With guidos and guidettes mingling with the local Cariocas, there will be plenty of guys around for Snooki to smush and plenty of girls Sammi to slap and punch away from Ronnie.

Isn't she beautiful?

4. Phuket, Thailand

Let’s move the (mostly) Long Island residents from one island to another and send them to Phuket. See MVP put their brawling skills against the best muay thai fighters in the world. What will The Situation make for family dinner when he only has the local fare to work with? Also, we hear it’s pretty cheap to get those, um, enhancements that JWOWW loves to show off.  

Megan, since you were in Phuket, can you confirm/deny Phuket's appeal as a Jersey Shore destination? Can the full moon parties handle Ronnie and "The Situation"?

5. Sarah Palin's Alaska?

Let’s see if the crew can survive in a place with no GTL. If they can party here, it would prove that they can party anywhere. The drinks would always stay cold – and the temperature even colder. Instead of hunting for people to take home and avoiding grenades, they’ll be hunting for meat and avoiding buckshot. Bonus: If they could combine at least one episode from these two shows, that would be classic. We’d love to hear Sarah Palin versus The Situation on foreign policy.

Other suggestions:

6. Barcelona - aside from having one of the world's most exciting nightlife scene (most bars close at 5-6, with the clubs open until 8-9am!), fantastic scenery, and beautiful people, this city has enough booze and soccer fans to satisfy the most hardcore guidos/guidettes.

7. Madrid - this city has the most bars per capita of any city in Europe, enough said.

Via: Time

So...What Do You Do Exactly?

Every so often, I find an article that hits the nail on the head for exactly what I wish I could say, if only so eloquently. When I was in school at UW and told people that I studied urban planning (don't even get me started with Geography!), I was met with blank stares and mild eye-rolling 90% of the time. You wanna do what now? The other 10% probably has some idea of the profession and assumes you are either a) an architecture school reject or b) a lost hippie who wants to create urban farms to feed organic food to the homeless - don't worry, some of us still do!

Really urban planning is much more simple than that. I want to be able to take people's vague ideas of what a "sustainable" future is supposed to look like and put them into practice. Are you happy with your current lifestyle? Do you worry about pollution and its effect on your health? Do you hate your morning commute and wish there was an alternative to sitting in your car wasting fuel while you idle? Do you wonder why you can't walk to your corner store the way your parents could? Ever wonder how your city will restructure itself due to the recession? Where its jobs will come from? Well, that's where urban planners come in. Because I'm terrible at explaining things like this, I'll leave it to a PhD student at UMaryland whose full article is below:

It happened again, as it invariably does every holiday season. In the midst of spiced eggnog and office holiday parties or visiting with family and friends, I get asked a simple question: “What do you do?” I politely say, “I study urban planning.” And then there’s the inevitable silence as I wait for the quizzical follow-up – “What’s that?” – and another brooding year of Christmas heartache. However, this year something changed. After I uttered my usual phrase, “I study urban planning,” my speech was met with a “Wow, that’s really cool,” and “Ah, that’s interesting, I have a friend who is studying that,” or my personal favorite: “I wish I had gone into planning rather than settle for law school.”  Yes, the field of urban planning was met with unbridled enthusiasm as I made the rounds this holiday season. A Christmas (or Hanukkah) miracle? I think not.

The plain truth is that urban planning is hot. If we take a look at the numbers, according to the Department of Labor, the urban and regional planning field is expected to grow by nineteen percent, from 38,400 jobs in 2008 to 45,700 jobs by 2018. Moreover, quite apparent is that a burgeoning global population has created the need for additional infrastructure including transportation systems, affordable housing, and schools while simultaneously existing infrastructure needs repair and restoration. It is no wonder that U.S. News and World Report included urban planning as one of the fifty best careers for 2011. But this is really just the beginning. 

In his notable work, Planning in the Face of Power, John Forester describes planning or designing as “a deeply social process of making sense together.” Planners, to appropriate the sociologist’s C. Wright Mills language, translate personal troubles into public issues.  Moreover, they help individuals and communities communicate and develop visions for the future based upon shared interests, values, and norms. In a time and place where the prospect of the future seems uncertain, unsettling and even frightening at times, the expertise that planners bring is needed more than ever. In this context, a perfect storm of factors is contributing to an auspicious growth for the field. 

Let’s be straight: Urban planning is and traditionally has been a relatively obscure field in a relatively obscure set of disciplines known as the social sciences (we like to talk things out). In her article “Planning Theory’s Emerging Paradigm: Communicative Action and Interactive Practice,” Judith Innes writes, “There are probably 1,500 people today who hold a planning Ph.D. The proportion of educators with a Ph.D. in planning is steadily increasing.” This was in 1995. Today, my educated guess is there are in the range of 2,500-3,000 people with planning Ph.D.’s and they are in more places than walking the corridors of the Ivory Tower both here and abroad. You can find them in think tanks, NGOs, law firms, and public policy organizations. In terms of academia, one only need take a glance at the Job Bank on the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) website to see the plethora of faculty jobs available. Indeed, the L. Douglas Wilder School at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) alone has announced it will be filling ten or more tenure-track or tenured positions in the coming two years. Ten positions! That’s larger than the entirety of many planning departments, and along with a number of new positions, the field is seeing whole programs commence and become newly accredited including those at Boise State University and the University of Louisville, among others. To put this in perspective for those new to the field, the annual planning conference for academics draws between 400-500 individuals yearly. The field is not large; we aren’t talking a department of history, economics, or political science here. We are talking about a field where there are at present fifty-four openings for urban planning faculty (I counted). 

Why all the activity?  A constellation of factors are at play, including:

• The first full generation of trained planners are on the eve of retirement

• The growing relevance and significance of planning, both locally and globally from Dubai to Detroit reflected by the ascent of wealth and the capacity to build mega-project (e.g. as in Dubai), but also the ascent of poverty resultant from failed public policy, markets, and structural economic forces (e.g. Detroit)

• The growing visibility of planning through media (including this magazine) and the blogosphere thereby precipitating more interest from the general public

As both supply and demand factors continue to incentivize the field, the explicit notion that both individuals and communities are looking for answers and find themselves increasingly reflected in the language of planning, whether tacitly or knowingly, begs the question: What does this emergence mean for how we train planners for the future? It is a question that generations of planners have considered, including Paul Davidoff and Judith Innes. 

Davidoff, regarded as the founder of advocacy planning, described in his 1965 article Advocacy and Pluralism in Planningthe need to broaden the scope of a planners’ education. He wished to widen the focus of planning to include all areas of concern within government. He speaks to the primary role the planner has as a coordinator and suggests that two years of graduate study may be insufficient to broadly train planners for this difficult job. Judith Innes, writing in the mid-1990s, notes the importance of allowing students to take over their own learning processes. She references an anecdote in a teaching workshop she attended which imbued her with a Deweyian lesson, “that learning by doing has far more power than simply learning by reading or listening and that social learning – learning as part of a group effort – has important advantages over the solitary investigation of the lonely researcher.” More recently, Leonie Sandercock contends the need for “therapeutic” processes to transform urban spaces from places of fear (racial, socio-economic, etc) to places of cohabitation and coexistence. Such processes could be structured in helping residents organize meetings in moving from fixed positions to shared interests. These three scholars are but three voices over planning’s lifespan that add to the discourse on planning pedagogy. The ascent of issues such as all things sustainability-related, social justice, and international development planning only contribute to the dialogue on what a planner should be learning.   

Peter Bosselmann, a professor of urban design in architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that among his students,

“

There’s an interest in international work right now, which probably has to do with the economy . . . Geographically, China is very important, as is India, and we assume that soon the urbanization of Africa will start becoming of interest. [Topic-wise], the environment is becoming stronger and stronger, especially the forces of nature and how they’re acting on cities, such as the rising of water tables.”

What so many of us love about planning is that it is dynamic. And urgently so. From the growing wealth gaps in the United States and globally, to environmental issues, individuals come to planning because they wish to effect change. We can only hope that as the institution of planning moves into the next decade, planners will be more cogent of their past, their context, and their responsibilities to their craft in embracing this dynamism. No Christmas (or Hanukkah) miracle required. 

Via: Planetizen

Why Your State Sucks...

Back in October, I posted a map of the 50 states with their most iconic movies that define the state's history and culture. How about a map of the states' dirtiest little secrets? I think so :) Thank you, Time!

A few of my favorites:

Washington - bestality? Unfortunately, this one's true and true. I'm going to quote the multiple sclerosis awareness industry here for a second, but: Is it the Trees?

North Dakota - ugliness? Maybe at the country fair.

Wisconsin? Binge drinking? Milwaukee is the drunkest city in America. Thank you Miller and PBR!

Via: Time

Ecotality's EV Project Gives Coulomb's ChargePoint a Run for Its Money

Last month I wrote about how Coulomb Technologies' ChargePoint America program plans to install 4,600 EV charging stations across nine metro areas in the next several years. So far, however, the EV stations have been geographically limited, especially in the Puget Sound area. Long story short, it's going to be hard to ease questions of "range anxiety" that many potential EV buyers will have if the only available ChargePoint stations are at Bellevue City Hall, UW Bothell, and a high-end condo building in Downtown Seattle (residents only). That's hardly the way to expand a network and create the necessary perception that plugging in your electric car will be as seamless and convenient as filling up at any gas station.

Luckily, that necessity breeds invention, and Ecotality's EV Project has filled in to give Coulomb's ChargePoint America program a real run for its money. The EV Project has a much larger budget, having landed a $99 million grant from the DOE - nearly three times the size of the grant awarded to ChargePoint.

The EV Project began in August 2009 and will be completed by the end of 2012 and takes a markedly different approach to the implementation of EV infrastructure than Coulomb. Rather than focusing on installing public charging stations, the EV Project is assisting customers who bought the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf by providing then with over 8,300 home charging systems. Not to be outdone in terms of public visibility, Ecotality is also installing 15,000 public charging stations. The project spans six states - WA, OR, CA, AZ, Tennessee (odd choice, although they've installed some of Ecotality's charging stations at the Cracker Barrel!), and DC.

Courtesy of The EV Project

Ecotality's EV Project also has the advantage of having major funding outside of the federal government. Swiss power grid corporation ABB just agreed to invest $10 million in the EV Project.

The bulk of the 15,000 plus residential and commercial charging stations will be primarily on the West Coast, as well as Texas and Tennessee. Just where will you be able to soon find your Ecotality charging station? One of the coolest things to come out of Ecotality's EV Project has been the official maps it has released showing station density in several cities.

OREGON

According to a September press release, Ecotality plans to install 1,100 charging stations in four Oregon cities: Portland, Euguene, Salem, and Corvallis. The stations seem to be logically aligned along Portland's major arterials, like Burnside Street, Sandy Blvd, MLK, and the downtown core.

Map of Portland charging stations

WASHINGTON

The EV Project plans to install 1,200 charging stations in Washington State, which will be a great complement to plans already underway to create an electric highway on I-5. With the help of planners at the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC), Ecotality has finally released a detailed map of charging station density in the Seattle area.

Via: GigaOMElectric Vehicles

When Horoscopes and Data Geeks Collide...

Ever wonder how the horoscope gurus of every astrology website or your favorite alternative weekly gets their grains of wisdom to produce your horoscope? Does it ever seem like the horoscope you get is repetitive, dull, or not-quite-spot-on?

Well, thanks to the folks at Information is Beautiful, there is now a graphic continuum of the most commonly used words in a sample of over 22,000 horoscopes, filtered by astrological sign.

For my fellow Pisces, here are the most common words:

• better
• life
• feel 
• happy
• change
• matter
• sure
• keep
• emotional
• energy
• decision
• moment

And here's a generic horoscope that could apply to anyone, any sign, at any time of the year, using this same data mining technology:

Here are some of the unique words mentioned for each horoscope across the range of data the researchers at Information is Beautiful catalogued:

Finally, the full range of horoscope traits they found:

Does this fit with your ideas of astrology? Leave a comment and let's hear your take :)

Via: Gearfuse

IFC's Portlandia Debut - Hipster chickens, co-op love, bookstore hate, and other beautiful nuggets of Portland life

A few weeks back I wrote about the new IFC series Portlandia that pokes fun about the unique alternative and hipster subcultures of our cute small-town sister to the south.

The show stars SNL's Fred Armisen alongside former Sleater-Kinney lead singer Carrie Brownstein (remember them?). Produced by NBC's Lorne Michaels, there are many guest cameos, including Steve Buscemi (which hipster movie hasn't he been in?) and Jason Sudeikis. With the power of SNL and Portland combined....

After watching its debut episode, I was definitely entertained and in stitches (quietly, at work, I should say). The show hits right on the head every stereotype you could possibly have about the Rose City. There's the fanatical obsession with local, organic food, the feminist co-op bookstore divas, adult "hide and go seek" leagues at the public library, and the most hilarious, stifled romance I've ever seen.

The wait for this long-anticipated show is happily over. Check out the debut episode below!

Looking Up Your Bus Route Should Not Be a Chore - Seattle Transit Frequency in One Easy to Use Map

Don't you hate it when you try to look up a bus time, and 10 minutes go by as you try to understand the oh-so-cryptic bus schedule information and route maps? For many of us, it's one of the biggest turn-offs to taking public transportation.

I can remember so many times when I would become trapped in remote areas like Factoria, Kingsgate, or Overlake because I misread a bus route map and caught the wrong bus, only to find that the next bus I was looking for didn't come for another two and half hours!!!

Thankfully, the good people of the Seattle Transit Blog have come to the rescue with this handy map of bus frequency in Seattle. This is an easy-to-use resource that shows all bus routes that have a frequency of 15 minutes or less - that is, they stop every 15 minutes. Realistically, people are only going to use public transit if they don't have to plan every single trip according to its schedule (hence the 15 minute frequency) and if routes are logically placed.

What's not surprising about this map is the extent to which it shows how imbalanced the transit density of Seattle is - Downtown, Capitol Hill, and the U-District pretty much have the greatest number of high-frequency buses, while the rest of the city is left high and dry. Part of this is due to the fact that it's easier to build transit in high-density areas, and part of it is due to budget cuts and bad planning on the part of King County Metro. In particular, the scarcity of frequent buses in West Seattle and Lake City is astonishing - these areas aren't exactly out in the boonies!

I'm sure this map will become my best friend as soon as I start taking the bus more due to the horrendous tolls coming this spring on 520.

Check it out!

Via: Seattle Transit Blog