Coronavirus Update: What's the Latest?

What's true?

February 8. Here (above) are two adjacent tweets. 

One tweet states that 725 have died and there are near 35,000 cases.

The next says over 50,000 have died and 1.5 million are stricken.

Videos have been posted showing what are allegedly Chinese government workers 

welding doors shut at apartment buildings where people inside 

have the virus.

* * * *

Gallows Humor (Optional)

On the bright side, if the coronavirus is going to wipe out the human race this year, 

I won't have to worry so much about my diet, cholesterol and triglycerides now.

*

According to The Navy Times, the number of cases 

as of 2 days ago is 34,500, not 1.5 million.

According to Al Jazeera the number of actual instances of the disease 

is smaller, not larger.

So who is spreading the disinformation? What is their vested interest?

Are they simply malicious? Or does fear travel faster than reason?

*

According to New Scientist, developing a new vaccine for a new virus 

takes at least a year. So don't fall for promises that you can get rich by 

investing in a biotech that promises to solve it in three weeks.

On the other hand, this same article states,

"The good news is that a few existing drugs might help to save lives in the meantime.
And new treatments could be developed in as little as six months."

*
The aim here is to help reduce your anxiety
if you're susceptible to thinking the worst.

Tech Tuesday: A Mid-Month Medium Update

I've been quite active on Medium lately, the ad-free blogging platform for writers and readers, which no doubt contributed to the dream I had as I was waking this morning. The dream went something like this...

Out of the blue someone contacted me and asked if I ever co-authored any of my blog posts. He said he wanted to co-write something with me on Medium.

I replied, by email, and said I had not but would consider it. I asked what he would like us to write about. He replied, "Columbus' second voyage to America."

No doubt this topic came up because of the annual controversies surrounding Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples Day which was in the news last week.

In the dream I agreed to work with him on this because it is by writing about things that I learn new things and it was something I actually knew little about. So I asked him to send something and I would edit and add to it, but what he sent was a link to a Wikipedia page about the explorer's second voyage to the "New World." He had not written anything at all. I replied that Medium doesn't work that way. You can't just plagiarize something by taking it from somewhere else and calling it yours.

At this point I woke up and thought, "Wow, that was interesting."

* * * *

For those unfamiliar, Medium is a relatively new social media platform started in 2012 by Ev Williams, who co-founded Blogger and later Twitter. One objective was to create an environment where professional and non-professional writers could share their work and find readers. Ease-of-use was likewise a pre-eminent objective as well.

After walking along the edge and sticking my toe in the water here and there from January till spring, I was enticed (inwardly moved) to finally dive in head first and swim in the Medium pool to see what would happen. It seemed to me that the only way to really understand the medium was by means of total immersion.

In June I made a six-month commitment to see what I could do with it. The initial attraction for me was that one could import previously published articles simply by copying the URL of your original article (if it's online) and pasting it into Medium, which does most of the heavy lifting for you.

You may still have to tweak a few things to get the look just right, but it's all very intuitive with no HTML required, and the pages are all WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get.) The look is clean and reader-friendly.

The more you are involved with Medium the more you appreciate all the thought that has gone into the platform. There are seemingly countless details that had to be considered which you might not notice as a reader, but as a writer you slowly find out the good people at Medium are looking out for your best interests.

Here's a feature that I especially like as a reader. Each article lets you know up front how long the story or article is going to be should you decide to read it. That is, they tell you how much time it will take you to read this if you start it. For example, when I posted an essay titled Thoreau's Journal, they put a little time stamp there below the header that says Oct 5 - 4 min read. There is nothing more annoying to begin reading something that is 25 pages long when you have only five minutes till your next meeting.

Whereas Blogger organizes content by author, Medium organizes it's content by themes, by using tags to batch content. Another way that this is achieved is through publications. Here is a listing of the Top 100 Publications on Medium. Most of these are Medium publications, though many well known publications have representation here. When you look at the top 100 list you will see that #2 there is The Economist and #8 is the Washington Post.

By reading through the list you can see the kinds of topics people are interested in. Much of it here is related to careers, tech and business, but there are also publications for writers, lovers and crypto fans. Although I very quickly became designated a "top writer" about art here, it's apparent that art is not the most important topic that readers are gathering to in this online blogspace.

Licensing.  Another thoughtful feature on Medium is that when you publish your article you can select what degree of rights you want to maintain. I hadn't noticed this at first, but when I learned of it, I quickly adopted it as an important step when publishing. You can choose to make your story a free public domain story via Commons, or you may restrict it from being re-used altogether. I have been trying out different selections, usually offering the right to re-print so long as I am given attribution.

I only recently learned that like the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers, there is a limit to how many free articles non-members can read. But even this has been addressed so that authors can acquire a link that enables friends to read your aticle even if they've already hit their limit for the month. Here is link to my article John Updike's Four Life Forces using this "free access" link.

One more thing I appreciate. Like Quora this is a very international community. I'm being followed and clapped for ("Claps" on Medium are like "Likes" on Facebook) by people with a whole range of unusual backgrounds, from Africa to India to Japan and Latin America. I am reminded of how when I built my first website in 1995 and put my stories online I eventually had three of these stories translated into foreign languages--Croatian, Russian and French. ("It's a Small, Small, Small, Small World.")

Like Facebook, Linked In and other social media platforms, there seem to be continuous changes afoot in an effort to make it better. So far I've been very happy in this new community. There are a lot of folk here striving to help you succeed, and editor/publishers who will notice your work if it is good. I've contributed to four or five at this point now. I'm looking forward to seeing where this saga will lead me. And you're welcome to come along.

RELATED LINKS
Read Ev Williams' The Medium Model.
How Medium Works With Writers (3 min. read)

Meantime, life goes on... Have a great day.

PS: In the "real world" Peter Spooner will be giving a talk at the Tweed Museum tonight on the paintings of David Ericson from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. in the Court Gallery.

Never Ending Tour Update: Some Things Haven't Changed

The countdown has begun. We're ten days away from Bob Dylan's return to Bayfront Park in his home town of Duluth, city on a hillside, where he was born and lived the first six years of his life. Does he remember the beach on Park Point, the Aerial Lift Bridge or the North Shore? Maybe not from that time, but growing up in Hibbing he was close enough to cruise down here when he got his driver's license. Saw Buddy Holly in the Armory here, among other things.

John Bushey, host of Highway 61 Revisited, the KUMD radio hour devoted to Dylan music these past many years on Saturday evenings, has been playing a clip from that concert. In 1999 Dylan rolled into town with Paul Simon. Despite the size of Simon's team, it was Dylan who rocked that night. The sound byte Bushey has been playing is of Dylan making two references to our city. The first is a sentimental one about how he remembers walking on the hills of Duluth. The second is more comical. He said he used to date a girl from Duluth way back when. He said she was so selfish "I used to call her Mimi." (me-me)

So we're ten days away from another leg of the Never Ending Tour rolling in and the big buzz is already on. What songs will be on his set list that night?

When I wrote about The Dylan Pool Wednesday, I made some predictions based on a scientific analysis of the previous several months, noting that night after breathless night nothing had changed as regards the band's play list. After a seven week layoff, the Americanarama tour has now launched, beginning in West Palm Beach. And guess what? A new playlist. What's more, the Tampa show at the Florida State Fairgrounds the next evening had some additional variety, with four different songs from the previous evening at the Cruzan Amphitheater.

One thing that hasn't changed is Dylan's opener: Things Have Changed, which he has now sung over five hundred times in concert.

Something else that hasn't changed is that Bill Pagel is still collecting and organizing all Bob's playlists, making them available online at BobLinks.com. For example, want to know what songs Dylan played at that July 3 concert with Paul Simon in Bayfront? What about his incredible 17 song set at the DECC in October the year before?

As Lee Marshall and many others have noted, it's not what Dylan says but how he says it that has elevated him to cloud-walker and maintained his superstar status. Fifty years ago he predicted correctly that the times are changing. Is his selection of Things Have Changed as an opener his way of reminding us that he called it right? Or is he talking to the fans who got on the Slow Train with him back in his Gospel era? Is he baring his soul or is he being and jokerman?

People are crazy and times are strange
I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed.

And finally, one other thing that hasn't changed: Dylan's ambiguity. Why he chooses this song and not that one for tomorrow's next stop is not going to be explained. Even if he did explain it my guess is it would be in a manner that makes you wonder if he means something different. Or maybe he really is being straight, but we simply won't believe it.

So... the countdown continues.

In the meantime, get your most up-to-the-minute Dylan news and information at ExpectingRain.com. Today's offering includes Patrick S. Pemberton's The tunes they are a-changin' and so are the play lists once again.

Featured eBook of the Day,  The Breaking Point and Other Stories available for Free Friday Download. 

Building a Sense of Place in Downtown Duluth

Scene at the PROVE Gallery this past Friday.

One day, back in the early 90's when we lived at the top of the Central Hillside in Downtown Duluth, I came home from work to find an artist from Bulgaria painting a landscape on the sidewalk in front of my house. I walked over and watched him for a few minutes, then asked where he was from and why he was here. He said that Duluth was one of the three most beautiful cities in the world the way the late afternoon sun rushed down at an angle over a steep hillside to a vast body of water below. He compared it to San Francisco and a city in Switzerland, perhaps Zurich if I recall properly.

The incident became a vivid reminder of why this Northland community is something of a magical place. And it’s one of the reasons why the Twin Ports region has become such an attractive nesting space for artists seeking a sense of place.

I’ve always enjoyed the title of Swiss psychologist Paul Tournier’s insightful volume A Place For You. A place, a destination, a home… a source of nourishment and development. We all long for it. According to the report released by national city planning experts earlier this week, the fermenting Duluth arts community has been this and is becoming moreso.

Tonja Sell piece at the PROVE.

The 78-page report has much of value, and though available to all (as noted in my column yesterday) I will take a few blog entries to highlight some of its features, observations and recommendations. There were seemingly countless people and hours devoted to assembling this information, and my guess is that the best way to build on what has been done is to keep talking about it, which I am sure was the point of Mayor Don Ness's press conference Tuesday.

Early on the report explains the background and outlines the aims of the of those who took this initiative.

In October 2011, Duluth city leaders, downtown businesses, and community organizations joined together to convene a mid-course review of progress in achieving the guiding principles and recommendations from its 2005 charrette. The review was sponsored by the City of Duluth, Duluth Local Initiatives Support Corporation (Duluth LISC), the Greater Downtown Council, and the University of Miami School of Architecture.

The 2005 Duluth Charrette Principles
1. Boost Duluth
2. Evoke a sense of place
3. Foster public safety
4. Preserve and enhance heritage resources
5. Invest in the public realm
6. Establish and restore the unique urban ecology of the city’s neighborhoods, districts, corridors, and downtown
7. Calm traffic and improve connectivity
8. Broaden the mix of uses
9. Expand housing opportunities for people from all walks of life to live downtown
10. Improve the regulatory framework

What impressed me was the quantity of people involved in this visioning process, as well as the caliber. Young people may not realize that the population here was once nearly 50,000 more than it is today. This was a steel mill town, major port in the industrial age as well as for the breadbasket of the nation. As the rust belt rusted, Duluth began to reconfigure its image, a process that has culminated in a document full of noteworthy recommendations.

Specific actions to pursue

 Arts and Economic Development – Treat the arts (visual and performance) as a retail and entertainment anchor; create additional places where artists can live and work, and in the process, liven up the street. Cluster arts and synergistic residences, retail and educational facilities in nodes to maximize the economic spinoff, and “Duluth is sometimes called the ‘San Francisco of the Midwest’ because of its dramatic topography, proximity to Lake Superior, and abundance of historic architecture in its downtown and surrounding neighborhoods. This, combined with its location in the northern alpine wilderness, gives it a distinctive character among small U.S. cities. The charrette team was inspired by Duluth’s stunning geographic setting juxtaposed with the traditional urban fabric imposed on the landscape.”

 Housing – Duluth has benefitted from strong public, private, and non-profit sector partners led by LISC that have helped stabilize and diversify housing options within the downtown for a wide variety of household types and income levels. The panel advocates maintaining a strong commitment to expanding downtown housing opportunities, including the addition of more market-rate housing and getting the word out about the fun and sophisticated living options in and near the downtown. Duluth’s economic and downtown development groups all need to help tell the story in addition to investing in making the Duluth Creative Corridor work even better as a regional economic engine.

The city and its partners should set quantifiable goals, provide the incentives to achieve them, and document successes.

 Institutional Partnerships – Capitalize on the presence of anchor institutions, including hospitals, and universities, in or near the Duluth Creative Corridor that provide two of the essential amenities (access to good health care and education) that are always top drivers in the “best place to live” studies and reports. Four critical “to dos”: 
1) Create joint campus/neighborhood-friendly plans; 
2) Provide incentives for employees to live near where they work (a household money-saver); 
3) Encourage students to volunteer and live in the corridor; and 
4) Invest in improving the off-campus environment.

 Marketing – Strengthen and tell the Duluth story, but not just in the Midwest. Duluth is ready to compete with great urban places like Boulder and Ashville that are Meccas for young creatives and outdoor enthusiasts. The identification and study of peer communities such as these and others can provide valuable insights into how communities of similar size and resources capitalize on their unique assets and strengths to compete. With its spectacular shoreline, dramatic topography, the Canal Park area, connections to northern vacation destinations, and burgeoning downtown nightlife and arts scene, Duluth has the natural and urban livability assets to become a national destination.

 Planning, Urban Design, and Connectivity – Adapt existing codes and adopt new regulations and review procedures that support and actively facilitate the realization of the Duluth Creative Corridor (treating street design in a context-based manner, for example). Great cities are defined by great streets. Connect the higher education campuses physically, visually, psychologically, and through branding efforts to the downtown and waterfront as one seamless, walkable urban living area. Invest in making Superior Street a cultural hot spot and a great street of urban stature.

 Leadership – Get institutional leaders more actively involved and invested in realizing the corridor vision. Establish a regular, ongoing coordinating group to keep the vision alive, assign actions with clear and trackable outcomes, monitor and document progress (the numbers are important), stimulate excitement and innovative thinking, and tell the Duluth story. The coordinating group must include community leaders from business, government, industry, non-profits, and academia that can take decisive actions that move implementation forward: marshaling resources, forging partnerships, removing obstacles, and empowering staff to effect change. In short, the panel concluded, the Duluth Creative Corridor will reposition Duluth as one of the country’s great urban places. As evidenced by its exceptional progress to date and the continued support for a bold, shared vision, the city has the requisite public and private leadership and fortitude to make that happen.

Years ago there was a jingle on the radio about this town designed to bring people back in. I believe it was Julie Finkel of the Centerville All Stars who sang it: "Downtown Duluth. It's Everything Special." With today's vision and the developmental achievements of recent years, I believe the slogan is apt. There's plenty of work to be done, but much to look forward to as well.  

In the meantime, get out and enjoy the arts. There are plenty of venues. Have a great weekend.