Cardamom Press

City Squid loves supporting Pittsburgh artists and locally owned businesses. We also happen to have a special love for aromatic spices and good clean art, so we just can't get enough of Cardamom Press.

(image used with permission from Cardamom Press)

This gorgeous pgh-themed art/stationary is traditionally-printed by a pgh local. I've heard that the artist has plans to expand the line to other cities in the future, but for now, revel in the simple beauty of our great city.

Share the find with friends and buy some for yourself!

We haven't seen this kind of headline dichotomy since...

... Pittsburgh was both the Best and Worst "Green City"
... the G-20 Summit was both a success and a totalitarian clusterfuck.

A screenshot from today's Post-Gazette online:

Article links:

Pittsburgh police investigating recent attacks on bicyclists

Pittsburgh receives national award as bike-friendly community

PS: City Squid isn't the only Pittsburgh based blog that finds odd headline pairings in the Post Gazette and highlight them with red outlines.

MOON8

City Squid Highly recommends MOON8, a dedicated fan's NES version of Pink Floyd's Dark side of the Moon. As Connor put it "I love it because it reminds me of playing Mario as a little kid and loving Pink Floyd at age 16." While for me the scenarios were switched time-wise, I couldn't agree with those sentiments more. Enjoy!

Roslyn Place

... has pavers made of WOOD!

The Times They Are-a-Changin'.

Stand back and squint, and Apple is moving towards being everywhere.

They've been "hip" for a few years now, ever since the iPod, but under this hipness lies a push towards ubiquity. Not ubiquity in the sense of universal wifi or cell network coverage, but ubiquity across any one particular person's day.

When, once, Apple was just a computer company, now many people spend their entire day utilizing Apple devices. Your alarm clock is fueled by your iPod. Your phone calls, texts, and tweets happen through your iPhone. When you are at a computer, it's an Apple computer.

In a broad way, as more and more Apple devices utilize WiFi, bluetooth, and cellular connectivity, Apple is actually moving all of your data "into the cloud"- off of any one platform and on to, effectively, all platforms.

And increasingly, Apple is coming in to competition with Google.

Strange, to think that a hardware company and an internet search company are now vying for the smartphone and micro-computer market. A lot changes in five years.

But it begs the question: what is Microsoft now?

Irrelevant?

What To-Do Lists Can Learn From Video Game Design

For five or six years now I've been a Mac-Owner, so for most of my adult life I have not been a computer gamer. All through high school I played PC games, but when I switched to Mac, the combination of limited game availability, the entrance into college, and the OS's relative beauty kept me out of the gaming habit- I didn't want to blemish this machine clearly meant for artistic productivity with games.

Jokingly, I developed a theory back then, that Windows machines automatically tainted themselves by arriving with the little Minesweeper-and-Solitaire game pack, while macs remained pure.

Then Kongregate arrived, and games returned as part of my life.

Kongregate, as the name implies, is a web-site that gathers together and hosts flash games. Its brilliance as compared to NewGrounds and other sites is in its API.

(API, for those not in the know, stands for Application Programming Interface. An API is an abstraction layer within the programming of an application (a website, a computer game, etc) that lets other applications interact with it in standardized ways. For example, one can embed a YouTube video (rather than linking to the video's YouTube page) into a website because YouTube has written an API that allows any random website to interface with it's video database and draw videos directly out of it.)

Via this API, a game can externalize internal game data in such a way that Kongregate can read it and, from that information, track a user's progress through the games on the site. In addition to the usual goals of any game (IE, beating it, getting the high score), Kongregate implements "Achievement Badges" given out for achieving certain in-betweeng goals (beat the first five levels, hunt 1000 ducks, etc). These badges are worth points on Kongregate itself, turning "the playing of games on Kongregate" into its own meta-game.

Interestingly, many Kongregate Badges are not for achievements that have to do with a game's internal definition of "winning" - they can be for something as anti-winning as "die 1000 times in this game" The badge system actually extends these games, given the players goals that were not even originally coded into the game itself.

(It's a bit like if you were playing Monopoly, but your friends have told you they will buy you pizza if you purposely limited yourself to only buying properties that were being auctioned (as opposed to buying every unowned property you land on, the standard practice in the game). You can ignore them and just play to win, but then you wouldn't get any pizza.)

This is all, of course, incredibly counter-productive (it might even be meta-time-wasting: I am slowly accruing veritable "time wasted points") when it comes to accomplishing real goals in real life.

Or is it?

Another experience I have had recently is with Chore Wars, an online chore-tracking site that frames the doing of chores as one-time-quests and repeatable adventures worthy of experience points, being undertaken by adventurers.

It is not just a set framework though- both the chores and their experience point values are user-extensible.

In addition to experience (an analog of minutes-spent-doing-chores), one can also program in treasures, which serve as tokens of having done any given chore repeatedly. For example, we have a chore in our house's adventure set called "Give Emergency Ride to Housemate" - a chore which as the only person with a car, only I can ever really complete. It gives XP and Gold, but also a "Ride Token". Looking at my total number of ride-tokens gives me an instant sense of how often I give people rides to school (IE, how often they miss the bus).

Where things get interesting is the bonus chores we have programed in. In order to encourage housemates to clean things up right when they make messes, there are a couple of bonus adventures that one can claim in addition to the chores themselves that reward doing those chores immediately. So if I was to make myself breakfast, and after eating it immediately clean all of my plates and pans and such, I would get not just the 30XP for washing-a-half-load-of-dishes-and-drying-them-too, but a bonus 15XP for "Speed-dishing". If I waited at all before cleaning the dishes, I would do the same amount of work, but loose that extra half-again-as-much XP.

Why does this work? I have no idea. Something in my brain seems to like the idea of more reward for equal work, and so just loves to get those dishes done now, when they are worth more. You would think that this do-it-now-bonus would be ineffective as a psych-out tool, as it was something I myself programed into the reward system, but that doesn't seem to matter to my reward-seeking brain- once the system was in place, I just started trying to work it.

There was an article within the past few years about the way in which World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs design their games specifically with this matrix of work, reward, and micro-milestoning in mind. Players tend to stop playing either within the first ten hours, or after many months/years. The leveling system is designed with this in mind- the first twenty or so levels are a breeze, deliberately short and satisfying as a way to hook new players in, a sort of rapid-power-gain appetizer to a much longer meal. From then on, levels are spaced as a slow curve of increasing time-per-level-gained, but rewards stop being about levels and start being other things- quest items, badges, etc.

A balance must be struck between making the game hard enough to be challenging, but rewarding enough to be fun- the game designers aim for a mix of easy-and-rewarding, hard-and-rewarding, and easy-and-rewarding, with just a hint of hard-and-unrewarding thrown in to add "grit" or "real challenge", but try try to keep the areas of the game separate, so that at any given level you are attempting only the challenging-and-rewarding bits.

How, you might ask, could this possibly extend beyond chores and games, into actual productive creation and work?

Easily, especially since I am already enmeshed in David Allen's Getting Things Done system, which requires the creation of a dozen or so to-do-lists as well as a weekly review system.

All of my lists have tick-boxes- completing any one action or project is like gaining a small achievement badge, and I have built into these lists meta-badges. Specifically, at the beginning of the day I write down a short list of the three or four Most Important Tasks I want (or need) to get done that day. Checking off those three-or-four boxes lets me check off a larger meta-checkbox- "Did Most Important Tasks Today"

Like Kongregate and and Chore Wars, these meta-goals don't even need to be directly related to the various projects that the lists are ostensibly tracking. They can be as abstract as the busy-making "Check off 40 things actions before bedtime", a meta-task which might not get me further down any one project, but which will probably encourage the cleaning up of a lot of little loose ends.

A week where I can check that box off every day is a special week, and worthy of a real little token of achievement, a meta-meta badge, like the ride tokens or an "impossible" badge on Kongregate, a holy grail of productivity-pride.

Such meta-tasking may seem a little odd and maybe a waste of time, but I find that the more I get things accomplished, the more I enjoy the sweet sweet satisfaction of checking things off.

It is that same part of my brain that Kongregate and Chore Wars scratches, the competition against others combined with-a-series-of-small-milestones combined with a slightly biased reward system part of my brain that loves to replicate models of these little systems and figure out the best way to work them, the part that loves... not cheating, but working the system effectively.

In a way, I am outfoxing my own mind, cajoling it to play a game that it can't resist playing, but setting up that game in a way that is fully conscious of the way I tend to work games, and guards against ways I might play the system that will win within the system but fail at turning that in-system productivity into real life productivity.

Refresh Rate of the Real World Update [Digital Density]

Looks like Google Maps just rolled out a panning-between-photos-of-the-same-object navigation utility for the geo-tagged user photos that Street View now incorporates, in a manner similar to Microsoft's Photosynth but all in-browser.

Here's the Tower Bridge in London.

Excellent.

Cardboard, Collapse, and Creativity

For some months, cardboard has interested me as an artistic medium. When I had the urge to create, I did it in cardboard. I have not had that urge often, but when I did, I created with corrugated fiberboard.

Cardboard interests me because of its marginality, imperminance, and ubiquity. Modern industrial society produces cardboard not as a goal, but as a side-product of packaging and shipping, and sometimes organization. Cardboard lacks inherent usefulness- it packages and protects other things, but does little else. If we did not make and use so much stuff, we would not need cardboard- its ubiquity derives from our ubiqutous consumption of other, non-cardboard things.

Cardboard crumples and breaks when exposed to water. It must live indoors, in the same conditions that humans feel comfortable in- cool, dry places. The elements make quick work of it if any kind of cardboard is left outside.


Cardboard is a great medium to work in when you are poor and creative. It's the junky crap of an overloaded culture bent on shipping material goods half-way across the world, maddeningly enamored with outsourcing, distance-sourcing. It's the side effect secondary cud of the great modern industrial machine, the ubiquitous trash of a culture made with things. It's everywhere, it's free, and it's big. It's not a shiny, expensive medium. It's not vellum or canvas. It doesn't require upkeep. It CAN'T be upkept. It's emminently replaceable, entirely suitible for rapid prototyping, quick acts of making and creativity. It's great for making a bunch of things fast and loose. It's great for making things that will disapear in a week.

It's there, it's ubiqitous, it's easy to collect huge amounts of it quickly. It works well with tempera and zip ties- sudden, dirty billboards, a little more solid than flyers and posters, but just as fast to fall appart and disapear into the mushy strangeness slicking in every city gutter.

It's great because you don't have to care about the logistics of what you make- you don't have to worry about making it too big or too small, or worry about wasting canvas or paint or time. You can just take ideas and get them out there quickly, get them done and into the world, where they can only be improved upon. And if you hate them, they are gone in a week, forgotten and melted like the Wicked Witch. Put them out into the world, and the good ones will survive.

Do it now, and do it in cardboard!

The City Squid, in Cardboard

Great Speech by Bruce Sterling: Atemporailty for the Creative Artist

Link

An excerpt on problem-solving in the modern world:

‘Step one - write problem in a search engine, see if somebody else has solved it already. Step two - write problem in my blog; study the commentory cross-linked to other guys. Step three - write my problem in Twitter in a hundred and forty characters. See if I can get it that small. See if it gets retweeted. Step four - open source the problem; supply some instructables to get me as far as I’ve been able to get, see if the community takes it any further. Step five - start a Ning social network about my problem, name the network after my problem, see if anybody accumulates around my problem. Step six - make a video of my problem. Youtube my video, see if it spreads virally, see if any media convergence accumulates around my problem. Step seven - create a design fiction that pretends that my problem has already been solved. Create some gadget or application or product that has some relevance to my problem and see if anybody builds it. Step eight - exacerbate or intensify my problem with a work of interventionist tactical media. And step nine - find some kind of pretty illustrations from the Flickr ‘Looking into the Past’ photo pool.’

Looks like City Squid's methods to a T, and that is just the warmup. The real meat of the thing is much further in. Go take a look!

The Great Migration

You might notice some interesting things happening in your RSS readers or through your careful examination of our Archives.

Indeed, we are migrating three older blogs of our little collective, Aphilotus! Aphilotus!, Man and Bits of Paper, and Ekistomancy, over here at City Squid.

For the unfamiliar,

Aphilotus! Aphilotus! was our earliest blog, and stood as our exploratory record during our adventures in Pittsburgh's urban spaces.

Man and Bits of Paper revolved around organization and de-cluttering.

Ekistomancy was a blog cataloging and commenting upon the connections between the Occult/Alternative Spiritualism and Urbanism/City Life.

Enjoy!

The Salton Sea

In light of our great content migration and as a break from all the cold posts, we thought we'd bring out a warmer article from our archives. Enjoy the catalog of our visit to Southern California's Salton Sea in Spring 2009.
Article originally published on June 3, 2009 over at SF0.




Brought you by Connor && Rigel


160 miles from the shores of Long Beach, California, the remains of a once hopping resort town lay. That place is Salton City. Initially, Connor and I considered driving out to El Centro, the true center of nowhere in particular, but we decided otherwise, and it proved to be the better choice. At this point in time, you would never recognize Salton's existence without knowing some of its history.

What happened there? Why was there a whole subdivision worth of winding residential roads named for every positive nautical image imaginable, now just dust and asphalt?

We came to Salton City already knowing those answers, but ill-prepared for the eerie, disturbing reality of the place.



H I S T O R Y

Salton City was one of a half-dozen tourism-driven resort towns circling the once-famous Salton Sea, in the heart of Imperial Valley, a fault-created rift that digs a long trough through Southern California.



The Salton Sea was once the Salton Sink, a local low point, 226 feet below sea level, but well enough inland that it remained as dry as the desert around it. It was formed by the shifting movements of the San Andreas Fault, which runs the length of California and is the main fault responsible for that state's Earthquake reputation.

The movement of the San Andreas, and the corresponding rise and fall of various Southern California landforms, is also, at the geologic scale of time, responsible for the changes in outlet of the Colorado River, which once ran out to Santa Barbara, but now runs south into Mexico.

When colonizing Southern California, much was done to levy up the River, so that more water could be directed towards the new settlements of Los Angeles, San Diego, etc.

But in 1905, heavy rains and snows in states upriver caused the levy to break catastrophically, letting the bulk of the river flow into the Salton Sink, which prior to that had been the flat, salty former-sea-bottom of a once-vast inland sea. For three years the river reconstituted at least a part of that vast sea, destroying the town of Salton but making a sudden and quite salty inland ocean, an ocean that due to it's relative height below sea level had no outlet.

For thirty years, between the 20s to the 50s, it was stocked with fish and brought thousands of bird species into the ecologically scarce Southern Californian desert region.

But as the Colorado River was brought back under control and used to fuel agriculture across the valley, farm runoff began to be the main source of input to the sea. In addition to causing floods that sometimes harmed the surrounding communities, the agricultural runoff also slowly poisoned the sea. Each year it gets 1% saltier, and immeasurable agrochemicals enter it, as well as all manner of bacteria.

Some time in the 60s it became unavoidably apparent that it had become a pollution-sink, and by 1986 it was all but abandoned as a tourist center.

It is now saltier than the Pacific Ocean, and only the Tilapia fish still survives, though thanks to frequent algal blooms, they wash up on shore in the thousands periodically.

There have been repeated years where the poisoned lake has killed the whole ecosystem, even claiming the lives of migrating birds who eat bacteria-poisoned fish and drink chemical-laced water. They take off again, only to die mid flight.

The system gets more unstable every year, and with it's bottom nearly the lowest point on the Continent, there is no easy way to drain the sea and return the land to it's pre-1905 state, to the time before we started fucking around with things.



T H E    V I S I T

When we finally arrived, only a well-worn sign assured us that we had.


Eventually we found our way to a lonely boat launch, an abandoned dock.
(note: there's a near 360º view that's worth checking out which you can download into your browser from the full list of photos over at SF0.)

To get to that dock, we had to drive, zig-zag, through what was once a residential subdivision. The road structure still reflects this- roads with names like "Mirror Lake Ave" and "Sea Nymph Ave" twist and turn, slowing traffic the way one might want to in a residential neighborhood. What made this surreal was that there was nothing- dirt and scrub plants, maybe- between most of the roads. The whole town is a big, empty plain, crisscrossed by a maze of crumbling asphalt.


For the most part, there are no longer even remains of past dwellings. While the actual sparsity of inhabitants was astonishing, more astonishing was the fact that people still live there at all.

The city even has a motel, although it's beyond us who'd travel to this city specifically and stay here.


The dock, if a little eerie, seemed mostly stuck in time. Signs still touted regulations, procedures and guidelines. The sea itself is still aptly named. It's vastness creates a near indistinguishable end. There were even pelicans to complete the illusion.


We walked out onto the jetty, and it seemed normal enough, disrepair aside, until we started examining things more closely. The water is murky and full of algal growth.


Along our pathway, we ran into the occasional dead fish, presumably lifted from its watery grave by a hungry avian creature.


There's the occasional unidentifiable litter, but the general pollution of the water is visually obvious. Amazingly enough, we still saw some live fish braving the waters.


Even the material of the path seems harmless enough, sand and crumbling concrete- until you look a little harder. Upon closer inspection, the length of decay becomes far more tangible. The edges of the jetty are, in reality, mainly comprised of thousands and thousands of tiny bones, and dead barnacles, all of which reside a good 10 feet above the waterline.

bones:


barnacles and bones

I even picked out some prime specimens to prove the point (and retain a memento.)

One can only speculate how they must have settled there. A more thorough scanning of the water revealed numerous dead and decaying fish in the waves. This gave us a new theory regarding the overwhelming odor with which we were initially greeted upon exiting the car (we thought it was just the water.)

dying

dead

Connor proposed that we take some photos posed with a dead fish, and then get out...

(images scaled to approximate actual height relationship)
Which we did, but not before I remembered I could get an even better look at the sea's awful contents by walking down to the waters edge, a realization that produced the most disgusting scene yet. As mentioned in the history, an algal bloom must have occurred some time just before our visit, because the ramp was lined with them, in various stages of decay. Here, the stench was at least triple the initial wave, and Doctor Subtle could not even venture towards the edge because of his sensitive gag reflex.

Even worse, as I stooped closer, I realized that those blooms really must be frequent, as the fish lay on an existing layer of clean, dry, bleached bones at least 4 inches thick in places.

And although my morbid curiosity compelled me to stay, the good Doctor prescribed we retire from this awful place. And wash our hands ASAP.

In spite of all the detritus, the strangest thing about this already weird area, and indeed the biggest contributor to the unsettling feeling that grew the longer we lingered, was the silence. When we stood on the bony shoreline, dead fish littering the beach the way beer cans litter other ones, the only sound was the birds and the small lapping waves and the wind. So it was in silence we quickly departed, bid the ghosts adieu, and hoped to hell they didn't follow us.

The Future is a State of Mind [Self-Reflective Futurism]

The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.

—William Gibson

Here at City Squid, we live by the above quote.

A few months ago on a long car trip I posited to my fiancée Rigel that we could probably pick up a USB power converter that plugged into the car's cigarette lighter outlet (most of which are now expressly designed not to be cigarette lighters) so that she could charge her iPod.

I had never actually seen such a device, though I knew that other, device-specific charging cords existed. I just guessed that someone somewhere would have gotten around to manufacturing the proper inverter-socket combination, seeing as specific-device converters have existed for years. We found a USB Car Adapter a couple of gas stations later for $15, at which point Rigel remarked that it was a different brand from the last one she had seen.

"Wait, you knew these were real?" I asked.

"You didn't?"

I had posited the theoretical existence of a vaguely futuristic device, and it was available at a random gas station for under twenty dollars, and other people already knew about it already. In predicting its availability and existence, I was actually behind the curve.

Maybe its that so many more people are working on stepping into the future that the entire sense of it has become lost — what was once front-page-worthy is now just daily advancement. What was once science fiction is now just existence. Science Fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson said just as much recently:

The fifteen-year-old who figured out a particular sequence of applications and services to use to be able to send a text message from his cell phone to update his Facebook status (before Facebook itself implemented that feature) has done network-and-connectivity work with complexity on the same order of magnitude as the creation of the Associated Press in 1948, just a thousand times faster and more pedestrian.

Communications technology has advanced so far, and advances so far each new day, that what was once a great leap into the future that only a tiny few could accomplish is now a baby-step that any teen with the right inclination can perform.

While working on this blog, my colleagues and I regularly experienced such moments of future-stepping.

The layout of the blog, for example, started as a paper sketch drawn in a notebook at a random Starbucks in Pittsburgh. I photographed it with my digital camera, pulled the photo onto my laptop via a USB cable (a cable which is being slowly replaced with wifi transfer technology), logged onto Starbucks' WiFi (which they protect by tracking in-store purchases and granting blocks of free use based on those, requiring three or four other computer systems syncing together), and emailed the photo of the page out to my collaborators for comment and review.

The Photographed Mock-up in Question

Alan, who was on his laptop at the time, got the email, looked at the picture, and immediately called my cell phone with his feedback, which I wrote down on another page after a brief discussion. During that discussion, I referenced the page itself to make my points, while he referenced the photo-of-the-page. I wrote down our conclusions on another page. Two hours later, Rigel looked at the email, and, knowing that I was at work and couldn't take calls, texted me her thoughts, which I also wrote down. When I came to a point in my day where I had some free time, I added her thoughts to my hand-written list.

Hours and hours later, long after the actual collaboration and critique had occurred, when Rigel and I were both at home, I took my notebook out and put it on my desk. She came over and pawed through it, opening to the above-pictured page. "Oh," she said. "There it is. In person."

The page had become a physical artifact of a transaction that had occurred mostly digitally.

Further iterations of the design process continued to occur in cyberspace only. The current logo was actually part of Rigel's Photoshop-made mockup of a possible design.

Articles have been written in one county and edited in two others. Newsroom banter has occurred via SMS, email, and Facebook as much as it has happened in person. Thanks to the cloud computing of Blogger, we aren't even sure where the servers that host City Squid even reside, nor do we particularly need to care.

As blogging organizations go, the tools we use are not even all that sophisticated. We have yet to dive into liveblogging from smartphones, or seriously figuring out how to link Twitter, Flickr, or other services into the page. But even small aspects of our process would have been technological marvels fifteen years ago. This blog is a step forward, a deliberate step towards the next stages of journalism, criticism, and engagement.

Bur rather than a jarring "future shock" each time we do something new and interesting to collaborate and publish, what registers with us is more of a hazy lens of futuristic-feeling, a pervasive sense that what we are doing every day is the kind of stuff that used to be in Science Fiction books. We are constantly aware that we live in a strange new world.

The difference is this: what pushes us into the future now is our own willful actions, rather than the greater technological advancement of civilization. Part of the continual acceleration of technology is that more and more people are becoming part of that advancement. It is not scientists and great thinkers who are pushing most things forward now — it is the combined baby-steps of everyone. Feeling futuristic is itself a step towards the future. We are futuristic because we have decided, consciously, to be so.

The Snowpocalypse of 2010

Here in Pittsburgh, PA we are experiencing what the yout's have affectionately dubbed the Snowpocalyse or Snowmaggedon (Snownami?) . . .

And it's beautiful.

It does, however, pose a variety of infrastructure problems.

In the span of just over a dozen hours, the greater metropolitan area received more than 18" of snow. While last night it the coverage was easy to dismiss as a heavy but reasonable, today the difference was overwhelmingly clear.

11:50 February 5th vs. 10:30 February 6th

Currently, the Port Authority is running only one of it's 184 routes (an EBA, between Swissvale and Penn Station), with no projections for when service will return to normal.

This, of course, has more to do with the progress of the city's plowing efforts. Around noon today, the city had just begun plowing secondary streets. Now, 3:50, even Wilkins has yet to be plowed.

In reality, conditions have been deemed so bad that Governor Ed Rendell "...has declared a statewide disaster emergency to enable state, county and municipal governments to respond effectively..." (via Public Opinion.) Indeed, running "City of Pittsburgh" through Google today brings up the Snowstorm Emergency Information Page.

By midnight last night, the accumulation measured around 11.4" and has already broken several records including the Feb 5th 1899 record of 4.7" and the most snow received on any one day in February (the previous record being from February 20, 1947 at 10.4".)

Our local drifts ranged from ~20" near the edge of our steps to 25" in some places, with most vehicles boasting 10" shells.

In addition to residents being snowed in, flights coming into to PIT have been re-routed and flights out have been delayed indefinitely. More than 100,000 people are without power as the accumulation has snapped many lines, and various trees, including three on the Carnegie Mellon campus, have fallen under the additional snow-weight.



It's a little difficult to balance one's love and appreciation for such a mesmerizingly transformed landscape with the fact that it causes so much trouble on so many levels. Fortunately, for some, hopefully many, it's still a pleasant surprise and one worth enjoying while it lasts.

We can also take comfort in knowing that the city is hard at work doing all they can to improve conditions and restore access, just as citizens themselves work towards clearing their own small section of the world. It'll take a little while, but things will be back to normal soon enough. For now, enjoy the snow day.

This isn't so SNAPpy... [Oh SNAP!]

There's great news on the Government Transparency front: The city of Pittsburgh has collected and collated all of it's public planning data into one big document, for easy reference. They call it PGHSNAP, short for Pittsburgh Sector and Neighborhood Asset Profiles/Action Planning.

There's only one problem! It's a eight hundred page document, mostly maps, and all of those maps are at incredibly low resolution. Most of the maps, despite being saved in a file format perfectly able to handle high-density vector data, are vector files saved as low resolution images and pasted in.

Exhibit A: the Open Space and Parks Map

Looks OK, right? Here's what happens when you zoom into the PDF:

It's a pixel disaster the likes of which I haven't seen since the PDFs the Port Authority puts out. True, slightly higher resolution maps exist for each specific neighborhood, but you don't hurt anybody's pixels by making the city-wide map, you know, readable too.

Here's the deal, City, in case you never got the memo:

It's OK to produce detailed, data-rich documents. This is the Internet Age, we can handle it. And for god's sake, don't put text in images without extracting it into something searchable. I wouldn't have found this whole page of blight maps via search, even thought that's text right there:

And I guess this would actually be pretty interesting data, if I could zoom in on the maps at all without getting a good idea of the number of Vacant Parcels in Pixelville:

And as for PGHSNAP's sister Project, PGHGIS, I'll like you better when you don't have such intersting rendering-issues, and are a little more navigable:

This isn't transparency in government quite yet- its more of a hazy translucence, like windows that have newspaper taped over them. 

I'd love to find some real life examples of such windows, but the blight maps are too pixilated for me to see.

Oh. SNAP.

You Don't Know What You Got 'Til It's Gone, Especially When What You Got Is Your Property Tax Base [Paving Paradise]

Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato does not like property reassessment one bit, which is bad because property reassessment is part of his job description.

Once upon a time, governments derived much of their revenue from property taxes, but in America income tax has slowly taken the lead. For the most part, American property tax dollars are the primary means by which local services (schools, fire protection, police, sanitation, etc.) are paid for. In Pennsylvania specifically, it is used primarily for supporting local school districts.

The Uniformity Clause in the State constitution allows different counties to tax properties differently, but requires that within any one county the tax is done in a uniform way. This seems like it would work simply in the case of property: just set the tax to be a blanket percentage of the property value of each property in the county. Uniformity? Absolutely.

The problem: how do you actually determine the value of a particular property in the county, and how often do you reassess that number?

Until the late eighties, the state required that every county do a full reassessment annually. In Allegheny county's case, this was done generally by looking at sales prices of properties in different areas, and using those to push the "assessed value" of the surrounding properties up or down a blanket percentage. That is to say, if the market in, say, Edgewood went up two percent over last year, the properties in Edgewood would all be reassessed two percent upwards.

When a given area's assessed value started getting out of whack with its real value, the county would do a "real" assessment again.

All through the nineties, various suits plagued the County over this practice, since the areas that got reassessed "for real" got reassessed heftily upwards 85% of the time, creating disparities in assessed value vs. real value between areas that were targeted for reassessment and areas that were simply recomputed.

Finally, thanks to a court order, in 2002 a county-wide reassessment was performed. Soon after, Dan Onorato was elected County Executive. He put a freeze on reassessments, choosing instead to regard 2002 as a "base year" and simply collect property tax based on every properties 2002 value. Since all properties were "really" reassessed in 2002, this would seem to satisfy the Uniformity Clause.

Not so fast, Dan.

The state law about using "base years" to compute property taxes does not require periodic reassessment at all. 2002's data can be (and has been) used indefinitely to compute Allegheny County's taxable property values. This creates its own set of disparities, as areas where property values have gone down (and, consequentially, the real net worth those area's residents have has gone down too) are now being overtaxed, while areas where property prices have risen are being undertaxed.

Three separate complaints have made their way all the way to the state supreme court, which ruled (pdf link) against the county's current practice and demanded an immediate reassessment. It's a pretty epic ruling, well researched and written, with a great introductory quote from a 1909 court decision:

“Controversies growing out of the assessment and collection of taxes are as old as civilization. To question the assessment, to doubt the levy, and to delay the collector may be classed among those inalienable rights of mankind not guaranteed by any Constitution, but very generally asserted under the law of human nature.”

-Delaware, L.&W.R. Co.’s Tax Assessment, 73 A. 429, 430 (Pa. 1909).

Essentially, the court found that by indefinitely re-using 2002's numbers, the county was levying taxes in a sufficiently non-uniform manner as to be unconstitutional, specifically that "The Allegheny County scheme, which permits a single base-year assessment to be used indefinitely, has resulted in significant disparities in the ratio of assessed value to current actual value in Allegheny County."

Onarato, though, will have none of it. Though there is clear wording in the decision telling the county to reassess and instructing the lower court to see that through, the County Executive (and as of October 2009, candidate for Governor) had made it clear that he will not be carrying out such an assessment, and plans as Governor to address the situation at a statewide level.

Now, City Squid understands why the early Aughts were a time where reassessing property value seemed like a bad idea. The real estate market was clearly bubbling, and to let county income be based on such a volatile measure is foolish at best. But to cling to 2002's numbers indefinitely is equally foolish. We can see why, though: when the reckoning comes, and assessed value finally catches up to real value, heads will most certainly roll, either because the population feels slighted for having been overtaxed for so long, or mad as hell that their taxes just got hiked so high.

Our thought: better in the long run though to be fair and accurate and unpopular, than willfully ignorant of your own tax base's value.

From the City Paper: Water Torture [Link-A-Saurus]

City Squid would be remiss if it failed to exhort its readers to check out Chris Young's great exploration of Pittsburgh's aging water-and-sewer system in last week's City Paper, aptly called Water Torture.