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Newbies in the news business often hear that if everybody is happy, we aren't doing our jobs right.
That mindset might comfort the DeKalb City Council, the DeKalb Area Renters Association, renters, and taxpayers after Monday's City Council approval of imperfect, incomplete legislation.
After about two years of negotiating, the city OK'd ordinances designed to achieve better, safer rental housing.
Probably the most contentious features of those ordinances (as the Daily Chronicle reported Tuesday) are a plan to hire city staff to implement them, annual registration of landlords, and requiring tenants to forbear illegal activities in rented property.
Much of the above is touchy because of how it will be paid for.
To pay city staffers, the city will charge landlords $50 a building and $15.24 a rental unit for three or more units. (Seems simpler to round up to $15.25, but whatever.)
Estimated revenue from this part of the formula is $227,000. The city will contribute $57,000, for a total program budget of $284,000. The formula approved Monday is one of four funding scenarios the council, city manager's office and DARA had batted around.
Landlords don't like the funding formula because about 80 percent of the tab is on them.
Jim Morel, DARA president and a landlord, said, "It puts almost the whole cost of the program on the backs of rental properties."
DARA/Morel wanted the city's general revenue fund to pay for inspections.
"As we have said before, the benefits and enforcement of these ordinances should apply equally across the community," he said. "Therefore, the cost should be applied evenly across the tax base."
In my view, landlords shouldn't squawk too loudly for three reasons:
1. Most renters are connected to Northern Illinois University (be they students or staff). NIU has no plans to relocate or close, so despite some added cost, the revenue stream for landlords should remain stable. Besides, it's not like they're saying, "Well, the cost of doing business is going up. Guess we'll have to absorb that and move on."
2. Landlords got something important. In July, Brad Rubeck, DARA's information director, emailed me to illuminate the difference between registering landlords and licensing them.
"The [Safe Quality Housing] Task Force and DeKalb Area Rental Association both agree that registration is important so that first responders can have contact information when incidents occur at rental properties," his email said.
What DARA really opposed was City Manager Mark Biernacki's desire (the way DARA saw it) to also license landlords, so that if a landlord committed numerous or egregious enough misdeeds, his/her legal ability to be a landlord could be yanked.
"DARA opposes licensing in its entirety," Rubeck's email said. "The actual need and benefit of licensing has not been demonstrated. … It will also adversely affect the values of DeKalb rental housing. Lower values lead to lower real estate tax base."
The licensing provision has been dropped.
3. Rental life is not all cherries and ice cream. I've been around college students every working day for years. If even half the stories about landlords and rental housing I've heard are true, we have a long way to go before DeKalb really has safe, quality housing.
Despite Monday's vote, the arrangement is not resolved because the parts of the ordinances both parties agree on create the most unease and are the least developed.
DARA and the city support mandatory crime-free lease addendums, crime-free training for landlords, a "three strikes" disorderly house provision, and a sidewalk exterior inspection program … but only ill-defined notions for what any of that means exist.
• Jason Akst teaches journalism and public relations at Northern Illinois University. Contact him at firstname.lastname@example.com.


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MACON, Ga. - Lipscomb swept the Atlantic Sun Men's Indoor Track & Field weekly awards for the first time in program history following record-breaking performances by Tucker Peabody and Gemikal Prude.
"Tucker and Gemikal keep pushing the bar, and our school records ever higher," Lipscomb track and field coach Bill Taylor said. "Both guys have the goal of qualifying for this NCAA I Indoor National Championships this year and they have a good chance. Certainly their start has been strong and we look forward to future competitions."
Peabody, from Memphis, Tenn., blazed the track at the Emory Crossplex Invitational by winning the 200-meter dash in a time of 21.31 before setting the Lipscomb program record in the 60-meter dash (6.84). Peabody ranks first in the A-Sun for both events and 24th in the nation in the 200m. His time in the 200 meters was a second faster than second place finisher.
This is the fourth career indoor track performer of week award for Peabody from the A-Sun
Prude, from Melbourne, Fla., leaped to a height of 2.13 meters (6'11.75") in the high jump to finish in second place in the event. He set the program record at the meet and now ranks 35th in the nation and first in the A-Sun in the event by a one-inch margin.
His jump also broke the school record.
This is his second career indoor field performer of the week honor.

subset: commoncrawl


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Hi, I've just been browsing to learn more about php frameworks and my interest sidetracked to ruby and since i already heard so much good of it and it's framework ruby on rails.
But is this a good time to go for ruby? Because i see only two threads in the ruby section and i heard not many hosts support ruby.
If you are using it; what are your experiences? And what would you say are the cons and pros of switching from php to ruby?


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Last week I mentioned that I've become mildly obsessed with the murder of Shaima Alawadi, an Iraqi-American woman who was beaten so brutally at her home in El Cajon, California, that she later died. I've also been reading everything I can on the murder of Joel Shrum, the American teacher killed by Al-Qaida in Yemen. They argued that he had been trying to convert people to his religion, which is Christianity. It's surprising how many news reports about Shrum don't mention that he was Christian, although a few weeks ago the Associated Press said he was Protestant. In the case of Shrum's murder, Al-Qaida has accepted responsibility for the act of terror against Christians.
The family of Alawadi reports that her murder was an act of terror, too. Alawadi's 17-year-old daughter, who slept through the attack in their home, says she found a note next to her mother's body that suggested the beating was a hate crime.
Police are investigating that possibility but they haven't made any reported progress on the case since it happened. No matter how many times I hit "refresh" on my Alawadi Google News search, the progress just isn't there.
When we looked at stories last week, we noticed that the media seemed to be pretty sure that the murder was a hate crime and that meme dominated the coverage. Rather dramatically dominated the coverage. That remains the case. Here the Houston Chronicle alerts readers to a recent conference in the area:
The deaths of Trayvon Martin and Shaima Al Awadi sparked national outrage and have since fueled continued conversation on civil rights in Houston and across the nation...
"We do have a lot of people in this community, a significant minority, who are anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, anti-everything," said Mustafaa Carroll, executive director for the Houston chapter for the Council on American Islamic Relations.
Representatives for CAIR touched on the rise of Islamophobia after 9/11 and privacy issues, such as the monitoring of particular people and organizations.
Carroll said that while Islamophobia in the U.S. is not widespread, the rhetoric of some public officials creates an environment where it can flourish.
"You have elected officials making ugly comments," he said. It's one thing for citizens to make it, but once you become an elected official you don't represent one segment of a community, you represent the entire community."
You just note that this is remarkably fact-free. What does "not widespread" mean? What does a "rise" in Islamophobia mean? What the heck is Islamophobia? As defined, it would be irrational fear of Islam. Is there any data set that measures rational fear of Islam, such as that which Joel Shrum's widow and two fatherless toddlers might feel, and irrational bigotry? I don't think there is such a data set. I can't even imagine how irrational fear versus rational fear would be defined.
I'm not even sure how much of a story should be built around CAIR. To some, CAIR is an important Muslim civil rights group. To others, it has troublesome ties to terrorist organizations, questionable rhetoric and little accountability (after losing their tax-exempt status last year). Speaking of, since CAIR continues to be a media favorite for discussing anti-Muslim bias, it might be good to do a follow-up to the story last year about CAIR losing that status. I just did a search on the IRS web site and it appears that the audited financials for the group for the preceding three years still haven't been filed, although perhaps the IRS is slow to register these things on the web site. The group has faced scrutiny for its involvement in a Hamas-financing case and allegations of foreign funding. When they lost their tax-exempt status last year, they claimed it was a big misunderstanding. Has that been resolved? Where do things stand?
Anyhow, the excerpt above comes from just a brief Chronicle story and probably not worth that much concern. But check out this Reuters piece headlined "Iraqi-American murder highlights anti-Muslim hate crimes." Does this murder highlight that? How do we know?
The article is just rather bizarre. It is both completely about how this murder highlights anti-Muslim hate crimes and yet admits repeatedly throughout the piece that no one really has any idea if this murder is a hate crime. If you thought that this might be reason to be a bit more careful with the reportage, you thought wrong.
The murder of an Iraqi-American mother in a close-knit refugee community on the outskirts of San Diego has brought attention to a rise in bias crimes against Muslims, even as police caution against definitively labeling her death a hate crime...
Alawadi's death comes at a time of renewed anti-Muslim sentiment nationwide. The number of anti-Muslim hate groups tripled to 30 in 2011, according to a recent report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which advocates for civil rights.
There was a big jump in hate crimes against Muslims after the September 11, 2001 attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda, but the number subsided during the middle of the decade of the 2000s.
Bias crimes are on the rise again, reaching 186 separate offenses in 2010, the highest in five years, the FBI data show.
You may note a few things. For one, the article actually treats the Southern Poverty Law Center designation of hate groups as something serious. There is no legal definition of what makes for a hate group, and the SPLC bases its ruling on ideology. As I wrote a couple of months ago, in their recent zeal to make it easier to bully opponents by labeling them "haters," the SPLC sort of nuked the fridge. They decided that quite a few groups that have moral or religious opposition to homosexuality are hate groups -- but only the Christian and conservative groups and not Islamic ones.
You might be more familiar with the term "hate group" when it's used to refer to groups that incite violence. That's not what SPLC means. But speaking of violence, you might recall that the SPLC president was on national media the day of the tragic Rep. Gabby Giffords shooting blaming conservative ideology for the massacre. The group's most recent hate group report was met with guffaws for the overwrought categorization of some "Patriot" groups and listing pick-up artists on its list. A friend on Twitter recently said that the working definition of an SPLC hate group is nothing more than a group that SPLC hates.
But even if you remotely took the SPLC's designations seriously, as this reporter did for some reason, if you say that something tripled to 30 in 2011, you need to explain what the time frame is. Did it triple relative to the previous year? Did it triple from the time such groups first made the list? Likewise, we need some perspective on the 186 separate offenses. What's the range of average crime against Muslims? Are we talking about, say, a tripling in hate crimes? An uptick of a few percentage points?
And what about some perspective relative to other groups? According to the most recent FBI hate crime report, there were over 1,000 crimes against Jews in the last year recorded. And yet we never see cover stories or features about the dangerous increase in Judaism-o-phobia, for some reason.
Anyway, in addition to providing some better numerical basis for the story, it would be good to get some stories about actual, verifiable hate crimes committed:
Community activists point to a history of violence and intimidation toward the local Muslim community, even as they say they cannot recall ever such a severe crime.
"Maybe this wasn't a hate crime. But I have cases that are hate crimes," said Besma Coda, Culture Adviser for Chaldean-Middle Eastern Social Services in El Cajon.
Some of Coda's clients have suffered broken bones and beatings in recent years, she said. One client had to get 10 stitches in his head because of a hate-motivated beating.
Again, these should be sourced a bit better, no? Names? Details? Court proceedings? I assume there is some sort of reason for objectively classifying something as a hate crime, so there has to be some sort of way to verify that, right? We learn that a leader at the San Diego chapter of CAIR says he knows of two Muslims who reported receiving threatening phone calls recently.
Now, if Alawadi was murdered in a hate crime, and people are suffering broken bones and beatings and stitches and threatening phone calls, I'm starting to get worried. I want to know much more about what's going on. But the story just goes on a lot of hearsay, which seems a rather unserious way to treat what is being presented as a very serious situation.
We learn of a recent vigil in front of Alawadi's house:
Some mourners wore the traditional black cloak and scarf worn by many devout Muslim women. Others wore T-shirts that said "Justice for Shaima Alawadi" above a silhouette of a woman wearing a Muslim headscarf.
Alawadi wore such a headscarf, and advocates for the Arab and Muslim community have suggested that her scarf may have been a factor in drawing attention to her as a perceived outsider, if indeed her killing was a hate crime.
Note how many qualifiers were needed for that last sentence. "may have been a factor ... if indeed her killing was a hate crime."
And to sum up the entire point of the story, we get this at the end:
The two cases, despite their differences, highlight broader questions of discrimination against black and Muslim communities in America, said Abdulrahman El-Sayed, a fellow at think tank Demos and an epidemiologist at Columbia University.
As darkness fell in El Cajon at the recent vigil, mourners raised their candles in the air and chanted "We want justice."
I'm not entirely sure how comfortable I feel about singling out one of the thousand-plus murders in the last month and declaring what it means before it's solved. If it turns out that this Reuters story accurately describes the campaign of terror Muslims are being subject to in El Cajon, and we learn that this crime was part of that terror campaign, then that's one thing. But did this story do a good job of telling what the Muslim experience in El Cajon is actually like? It's seriously at odds with the other stories I've been reading about the area being a fairly healthy and friendly and vibrant Muslim community. And I guess I'd like to know just a bit more about whether this was an actual terrorist attack against Alawadi before we decide that she was killed for wearing a hijab and so on and so forth.


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From AlsaProject
Road Map of future ASoC development (in progress items are currently in ppc-dev branch).
Road Map
- Move I2C probing out of codec and into machine drivers. This should also allow the pcm and card registraion to move into the machine driver.
Implemented in mainline, work in progress on converting drivers to the new model.
- Look into creating a DAI (digital audio interface), codec and Platform DMA device
classdrivers. This should create a standard set of operations and capabilities for each end (codec and SoC controller) of the DAI and should simplify configuration & development. This would allow allow each device to be individually probed.
Implemented in mainline.
- Support multiple sound cards.
- Move audio map into userspace. This should then allow scenario's to be defined by specifying the source and sink (instead of by each mixer setting).
- Add support for multiple substreams.
Implemented in asoc-v2-dev branch.
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