Monday, June 24, 2019

Getting-A-Clue Better Late Than Never: Mesa Mayor John Giles On Affordable Innovative and Equitable Housing

What "bubble" has Hizzoner John Giles been in for decades when he stated publicly last Friday that he's just "beginning to understand" what other mayors have understood for a long time:
Giles has been the mayor here in Mesa for more than 4 years
Affordable Housing is a problem
ASPEN, Colo. — In the midst of one of the country's leading gatherings on health and health care, one issue – quality, affordable housing – has been pointed to as the source of many of the nation's ills.
"Mayors have understood for a long time that affordable housing is a problem," John Giles, mayor of Mesa, Arizona, said Friday during a session at the Aspen Ideas: Health conference here in Colorado.
"I am beginning to understand that it is the problem."
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Post on his Facebook page June 21, 2019
Mayor John Giles is with John Giles.
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Image with Maria Hinojosa and Shirley Franklin
"Excellent panel this morning at the #AspenIdeas Festival about Housing and Health, how they are inextricably connected and how communities are developing new approaches to housing that include health. #AspenIdeasHeaIth "
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That revelation came in a recent article in U.S. News and World Report
Better Housing for Better Health
Improving where people live can go a long way toward helping them live healthier lives, stakeholders say.
By Steve Sternberg Assistant Managing Editor for Health Initiatives
June 21, 2019, at 5:46 p.m.
 

Dr. Richard Besser, a pediatrician and president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, noted that many people don't realize such neighborhood disparities are the result of deliberate policy decisions designed to disadvantage people who lived in them.
"Who was given the opportunity to buy homes? It was not people of color," he said. "They were not given mortgages. They were not allowed to move to suburban America."
"I realized this was going to have a significant impact in my community," Giles said. "There was nothing more important than what we were doing that day."
Research indicates links between substandard housing and problems ranging from asthma and lead poisoning to cardiovascular disease and mental health issues.
Evidence documenting housing's impact on health has been piling up for decades.
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The challenge is coming with solutions, said Shirley Franklin, the former mayor of Atlanta and the executive board chair of Purpose Built Communities, an Atlanta-based community revitalization consultancy. . .
Today, that housing has been replaced with appealing mixed-income residences. . . "The goal is to build a community where you can't tell the socioeconomic status of the people who live there," she said.
Tags: housing, race, public health
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HOW NOT TO BE IGNORANT ABOUT THE WORLD
Views: 1,775,133
 
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THE INFLUENCE OF HOUSING ON HEALTH
Aspen Ideas: Health explores challenges in medicine, science, and global health and brings together people unafraid to face them down.
https://www.aspenideas.org/sessions/the-influence-of-housing-on-health
"Improved housing offers a tremendous opportunity to boost health. Some of the links between substandard housing and poor health are obvious, if alarming – pests and mold promote asthma, lead poisoning irreversibly damages the brains of developing children, inadequate heating and ventilation increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. Less immediately visible is the impact of unaffordable housing, which forces families to make choices among basic needs, and neighborhood conditions, such as lack of access to nutritional food. To lift up their residents and position their cities for economic growth, US mayors are turning to innovative partnerships to safeguard that place called home.
"John Giles is the mayor of Mesa, AZ.
< He was first elected in a special election in August 2014, then re-elected two years later to begin a full, four-year term in January 2017.
Giles previously served on Mesa City Council from 1996 to 2000, including a term as vice mayor. He has managed his own law firm, Giles & Dickson, for over 20 years. Overseeing a growing economy that has added thousands of new jobs, new national employers, and over $1.5 billion in capital investment, Giles is bringing renewed focus to Mesa’s downtown, which includes a budding innovation district, as well as expanding higher education and pre-K options in the city."
https://www.aspenideas.org/speakers/john-giles https://www.facebook.com/MayorGiles/
Speakers

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Sunday, June 23, 2019

Think Spatially > Add Data to Your Location Models

Map of The Month: Trajectories of Neighborhood Change
Socio-Economic Inequalities are documented for view and examination in this mapping tool from https://carto.com/blog  
 
RECORDED WEBINAR
Think Spatial: Don't Ignore Location in your Models!
Link > https://go.carto.com
Data with a spatial component is increasingly used in data science modelling practices but the spatial nature of the  data is rarely taken into account. Spatial data science involves a skillset ranging from the visualization of data on a map to modelling (at feasible computational cost) spatially correlated errors.
 In this technical webinar, Giulia Carella (Data Scientist) and Steve Isaac (Content Marketing Manager) share how thinking spatially can help you to build powerful models that outperform the typical data science tools.  The webinar covers two areas:
 > Introduction to spatial modelling, including tools to build such statistical models, estimate their parameters, and perform predictions.
> Demos of practical use cases where spatial models are useful and how to implement them taking advantage of CARTO’s tech stack (including CARTO Data Observatory for data enrichment, and CARTOframes for visualizations and returning spatial SQL queries).
A pdf of the slides from the presentation is also available for download here. 
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Jon Talton: Tongue-Lashing All "The Phony Happy Jive-Talk" For Phoenix

Sure looks like the indomitable Jon Talton is hitting his stride once again with a warmed-up pen in excessive heat and dirty air all across the entire East Valley and the Phoenix Metro Area - with Mesa as the biggest suburban sprawl  in the entire nation.
Rogue Columnist
Hype rises as the heat accelerates. Talton takes it all down when he disrupts some newly-concocted "Urban Myths" about fast growth:
Growth doesn't pay for itself.
"As regular readers know, population growth brings carrying costs: Increased need for
  • infrastructure
  • public services
  • schools
  • healthcare
  • not to mention the externalities — the cloaked expenses from more sprawl, destruction of the environment, pollution, etc. . . "
NOT TO MENTION? WHY LET IT TRAIL OFF THERE?
Readers of this blog can find out more by using the Searchbox on this blog - type in "Mesa Ranks" or "Phoenix Ranks" or "Arizona Ranks"
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Debunking the myths:Population increase in Phoenix can be attributed to retirees and the low-wage service jobs that cater to them.
If the local-yokel boosters — "things must be good because people keep moving here" — are having a growthgasm, they're faking it.
> Phoenix ranks as one of the worst cities for growth of its millennial population. It even ranks poorly for baby boomers. This helps explain why it has such a low percentage of its adult population with bachelor's degrees or higher among major metros. It's home to one of the largest public universities in the country but can't retain this talent base.
On the latest Brookings Institution Metro Monitor, Phoenix came in No. 74 on standard of living and No. 31 in average annual wage. Phoenix has an abysmal showing in job concentration, a critical measure of how metros perform in the most advanced technology sectors. Astoundingly, Phoenix even does poorly in so-called opportunity jobs — promising positions for those without a college degree (coming in 76th in this rigorous Federal Reserve study). In other words, this is no blue-collar heaven, even if it performs poorly in advanced, high-skilled college-degree jobs.
READ MORE > https://www.roguecolumnist.com
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The New Game of Double-Jeopardy: Offensive Cyberwarfare Attacks on "Virtual Territory"

According to a report by Ellen Nakashima in The Washington Post late yesterday afternoon, offensive cyber strikes were launched Thursday night by personnel with U.S. Cyber Command that  disabled Iranian computer systems used to control rocket and missile launches in response to its downing Thursday of an unmanned U.S. surveillance drone.
The subsequent reaction:Two days later the Trump administration on Saturday warned industry officials to be alert for cyberattacks originating from Iran.
> Ellen Nakashima notes in her report, "The White House declined to comment, as did officials at U.S. Cyber Command. Pentagon spokeswoman Elissa Smith said: “As a matter of policy and for operational security, we do not discuss cyberspace operations, intelligence or planning.'"
> . . . On Saturday, the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning to U.S. industry that Iran has stepped up its cyber-targeting of critical industries — to include oil, gas and other energy sectors — and government agencies, and has the potential to disrupt or destroy systems. . .
“There’s no question that there’s been an increase in Iranian cyber activity,” said Christopher Krebs, director of DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “Iranian actors and their proxies are not just your garden variety run-of-the-mill data thieves. These are the guys that come in and they burn the house down.”
Krebs, in an interview, said, “We need everyone to take the current situation very seriously. Look at any potential incidents that you have and treat them as a worst-case scenario.
 
This is not you waiting until you have a data breach . . . This is about losing control of your environment, about losing control of your computer.”
“The reality is we’ve been seeing more and more aggressive activity for quite some time,” he said. “It’s just getting worse.”

All these offensive and defensive actions are a reflection of a new Cyber Command strategy — called “defending forward” — that its leader, Gen. Paul Nakasone, has defined as operating “against our enemies on their virtual territory.” 
The Implications of Defending Forward in the New Pentagon Cyber Strategy
Blog Post by Guest Blogger for Net Politics
September 25, 2018
Link to the source:
Council on Foreign Relations
 
Ben Buchanan is an assistant teaching professor at Georgetown University and the author of The Cybersecurity Dilemma. You can follow him @BuchananBen
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". . . it was hard to know if the intruders were setting up for a significant cyberattack or if they were just gathering intelligence. In light of this ambiguity, and due to some particular operational factors endemic to hacking efforts, nations are likely to assume the worst and not give the intruders the benefit of the doubt. It seems reasonable to expect that, as hard as it is to differentiate between intelligence collection and attack in cyber operations, it is even harder still to distinguish between defending forward and attacking forward. If  the new strategy permits U.S. operators to be more aggressive than what the NSA was previously doing, that could have significant implications for escalation risks.  
. . . policymakers and scholars should not pretend that defending forward is an entirely new concept nor one without its own associated dangers.  

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Friday, June 21, 2019

Bloomberg Philanthropies Annual Report 2019

Bloomberg Philanthropies works to ensure better, longer lives for the greatest number of people by focusing on five key areas: Arts, Environment, Education, Public Health and Government Innovation.
"I always believe that tomorrow will be better than today. But I’m also a realist, and I know that believing and hoping won’t make it so. Doing is what matters.”
There's a link to download the entire 2019 Annual Report
Annual Report 2019
Global Reach
Bloomberg Philanthropies invests in 510 cities and 129 countries around the world.
In 2018, Bloomberg Philanthropies invested $767 million around the world. Over his lifetime, Mike has so far given more than $8 billion to philanthropy.
Reference: https://annualreport.bloomberg.org/ _________________________________________________________________________
Approach
Bloomberg Philanthropies‘ unique approach is grounded in Mike Bloomberg‘s experience in business, government, and philanthropy. In every challenge that the Bloomberg team takes on, they bring his approach to make progress saving and improving lives around the world.
About Bloomberg Philanthropies
Encompassing all of Mike Bloomberg’s giving, Bloomberg Philanthropies includes his foundation, corporate, and personal philanthropy as well as Bloomberg Associates, a pro bono consultancy that works with mayors in cities around the world.
Mike has committed the vast majority of the profits from Bloomberg L.P., the global financial technology, data, and media company that he founded in 1981, to support the work of Bloomberg Philanthropies.
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“In all of our work, we look for strong partners, try innovative solutions, follow the data, and spread what is proven to work.”
Patricia E. Harris
CEO Letter
Lead from the Front and Do Not Hesitate to Address Controversial Issues. Utilize Advocacy and Lobbying.
Philanthropy can make great progress, but true change requires governments to act. Find out how Mike’s private advocacy is advancing the cause on issues like gun safety.

Look for Unmet Needs that Can Be Addressed with Proven Solutions.
Some challenges are easy to overlook, but taking them on can make a real difference. Learn how leaders of small arts and cultural organizations are strengthening their management skills to ensure that their organizations thrive.
 
Identify and Engage Strong Partners.
Tackling important issues, like expanding career opportunities for those who do not attend college, requires collaboration. Learn how local, nonprofit partners make progress possible
Focus on Cities to Drive Progress.
Local government can be the site of innovation and problem-solving that improve residents’ lives. Read how one local government is taking on a major challenge
Remain Flexible to Invest Boldly and Quickly in Order to Maximize Impact.
New opportunities can arise without warning, and with issues like climate change there is no time to waste. Find out how Mike stepped in at a crucial moment to rally local leaders to tackle a global challenge..
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Harnessing the Power of the Arts to Impact Communities: 2019

Please listen up ...
Published on Jun 21, 2019
Kate Levin, Bloomberg Philanthropies Arts lead, shares how public art can bring communities together and inspire new perspectives on important topics.
Discover more in the 2019 Bloomberg Philanthropies Annual Report: https://bloombg.org/2FjIges
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Sixth Annual Building a Competitive U.S.-Mexico Border Conference Pt.6

There are five parts
Published on Jun 21, 2019
The Wilson Center's Mexico Institute and the Border Trade Alliance invite you to our sixth annual high-level "Building a Competitive U.S.-Mexico Border" conference, which will focus on improving border management in order to strengthen the competitiveness of both the United States and Mexico. Topics covered at the conference will include
USMCA (the renegotiated NAFTA),
strengthening security and efficiency at border ports of entry,
the impact of tariffs and reduced staffing on trade, and
growing cross-border cooperation for regional economic development.
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Zelensky Calls for a European Army as He Slams EU Leaders’ Response

      Jan 23, 2026 During the EU Summit yesterday, the EU leaders ...