Planting a Clock That Tracks Hours by Flowers

 Five Minutes to Moonflower

 Ooh....just the idea, of telling time, by observing the flowers blooming in your garden, sends chills thru my body. What a fun, fresh way to stay  grounded in nature and connected to the cosmos. All while enjoying the sequential passage of the day! How's that for going 'off the grid'!

Gardeners and nature lovers, get your hands dirty with this one!  

The article connects floral beauty with time, but it also takes the gardener a step closer into the realm of knowledge the Egyptian priest healers employed, regarding the proper time to harvest and use the different parts of a plant for medicine. Plants are so awesome in their capabilities and sensitivities. In fact, let me stop here, and just encourage you to pick up one of my favorite books, The Secret Teachings of Plants - The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. The author is Stephen Harrod Buhner.

lovu,

Kendke

 

Five Minutes to Moonflower

In the Garden

By MICHAEL TORTORELLO

The professionals said it could not be done. They had never tried it, and they didn’t know any public garden that had tried it, and they wouldn’t recommend anyone else give it a try.

This was not the response I expected when I called a few plant people and asked how to design a type of flower bed that has been around since the mid-18th century. It’s called a Horologium Florae: a flower clock. (No relation to the Apple Watch.)

“Please don’t show this to my bosses,” said Marc Hachadourian, the director of the Nolen Greenhouses, a 43,000-square-foot grow facility at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. What Mr. Hachadourian, 41, meant was, Don’t give management any ideas.

He was joking. Mostly. Because once you hear it, the idea behind the flower clock is irresistible. First, identify a selection of a few dozen flowers that open and close at regular hours. They can be old friends like lilies, marigolds and primroses. Next, plant them in an organized fashion — perhaps in the segmented shape of a dial or clock face.

At this point, clock-watchers may want to skip ahead to the useful flowering timetable in the second half of this article. The seeds and plants for growing a flower clock may already be tick-tick-ticking in the stack of garden catalogs on the mail table.

Here’s how the timepiece works. During a stroll in the summer garden, you notice that the sow thistle petals are open while the adjacent pumpkin blossoms remain shut. The first plant, according to your records, blooms reliably at 5 a.m.; the second at 6 a.m.

Who needs a watch when the flowers know the time?

Like so many botanical concepts, the flower clock originated with the Swedish ur-taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, in his 1751 treatise “Philosophia Botanica.” Based on field observations, he divided flowers into three categories. The meteorici open and close with the weather. The tropici follow the changing hours of daylight. And the aequinoctales, Linnaeus wrote, “open precisely at a certain hour of the day and generally shut up every day at a determinate hour.”

From this third category, the aequinoctales, Linnaeus compiled a list of a few dozen plants to open and close with the hours: hawkweed, garden lettuce, marigold, day lily. Horticulture meets horology.

It seems unlikely that he ever planted one himself, said Gina Douglas, the honorary archivist at the Linnean Society of London. (Is there a dishonorable archivist — the equivalent of a naughty librarian?) It would be better, Ms. Douglas wrote in an email, to think of the flower clock as a method for using the flora in the local landscape to estimate the time.

Over the years, the Linnean Society has received regular inquiries about the flower clock and how to make one. For the most part, Ms. Douglas said, nothing seemed to come of it. In 2008, a public art group in Vancouver, British Columbia, started a wiki to collect flowering observations. But to date, the Vancouver Flower Clock Project hasn’t produced a bumper crop of data.

The challenges of urban botanizing can be gleaned from a 9 p.m. post about the dandelion (Taraxacum officinale): “Looked out bus window, Petals closed. Warm evening after a clear warm summer day. There is a group of teenage girls trying to set the seeding blooms on fire with their lighter.”

­

Or maybe the problem with the flower clock is that it doesn’t work. Linnaeus, for a start, made many of his observations in the endless summer daylight of Uppsala, at about 60 degrees north. At more reasonable latitudes (New York lies around 40.5 degrees north), these same flowers typically unfold later in the day.

Some of Linnaeus’s choices can be seen growing at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, said Melanie Sifton, 39, the garden’s vice president for horticulture. But they’re not prize specimens in the collection; they’re roadside weeds and volunteers. “Some Northern European wildflowers are our weeds,” Ms. Sifton said.

European bindweed (Convolvulus arvensis), for example, may open like the chiming of a clock at 5 a.m. But, Ms. Sifton said: “No gardener wants that weed. It has roots that go down to hell.”

An even greater barrier to creating a floral clock is conceptual: The aequinoctales, those fixed-hour blooms, do not exist. Or not precisely as Linnaeus described them, anyway. We are wandering here from the Nordic wildflower meadow to the university laboratory and the study of photoperiodism. This is the relationship between day length and plant behavior.

More than a century of research suggests that a flower’s circadian clock is filled with complications. Light is a dominant factor in opening and closing. These cues include the changing length of dark and light periods, the intensity of light, even the wavelength.

Temperature is another influence, and to a lesser extent so is humidity. Electric fields may play a role in flowering. Apparently a blossom carries a negative charge, while an insect in flight holds a positive charge.

It’s hard to put one over on a dandelion.

All that said, some plants do show endogenous rhythms, or an internal clock. Selenicereus grandiflorus, a night-blooming cactus, will continue to open at the same hour, even after you’ve brought it inside and exposed it to darkness during the daytime and light at night. (Correction: it will for a while, at least.) A field marigold moved from the garden to a dark room will still open its flowers on a 24-hour cycle. (Again, for a spell.)

A plant seems to practice a form of federalism: the flower obeys its own governor. A light shined on just the leaves apparently will not change the rhythm of the flower buds.

These mystifying habits have something to do with pollination. The white petals on a night-blooming cactus, Ms. Sifton said, attract not the morning bee but a night flyer, the sphinx moth. At daybreak, the flowers shut to protect pollen and husband resources.

Tracing the flower’s genetic pathways will get you only so far. A thorough 2003 review of floral research, published in the “Journal of Experimental Botany,” includes the following thought: “It may be noted, in this scientific context, that flower opening has inspired many artists and seems of special emotional value to people.”

Hey, it’s a working hypothesis. Support for this claim rests in the sentimental British garden journals of the early 19th century, where the flower clock inspired some marvelously bad poetry:

Broad o’er its imbricated cup,

The goat’s-beard spreads its golden rays,

But shuts its cautious petals up,

Retreating from the noontide blaze.

The verse never does find a workable rhyme for Hieracium (a perennial in the sunflower family). But the poetry of the flower clock continues to grip the imagination. A few days ago, for instance, my partner texted me an offhand reference to the flower clock in her latest book-club novel, “Arcadia” (Voice, 2012), by Lauren Groff.

A few weeks earlier, I’d stumbled upon a reference in the brand new novel “Glow” (Knopf), by the literary prestidigitator Ned Beauman. The plot involves pirate radio, a paid dog-walker with a nonconforming sleep cycle, Burmese mining concessions and a poppylike psychoactive plant called “glo,” which blooms under 24-hour lights. You can probably guess how it all turns out.

When I reached him by Skype in London, Mr. Beauman, 29, confessed to a florid ignorance of practical gardening. “Actually, what I like about it is it’s so impractical,” he said of Linnaeus’s invention. “One imagines someone waking up in the middle of the night, putting on their dressing gown and then bending over in the garden and smelling the nipplewort and then saying, ‘Wow, it’s late.’ And then going back inside.”

Three authors do not make a trend. But one of these, the science writer Joshua Foer (“Moonwalking With Einstein”), did his best to cultivate one. A few years ago, Mr. Foer, 32, assembled a collection of seeds and sold out some 200 kits through Quarterly Co., a purveyor of curated packages.

Mr. Foer discovered the Horologium Florae while compiling an article for the magazine Cabinet, titled “A Minor History of Time Without Clocks.” He cited, for example, a “German woodsman’s” plan for an “ornithological clock,” following the hourly birdsong of the green chaffinch (1 to 2 a.m.), the black cap (2 to 3:30 a.m.), the hedge sparrow (2:30 to 3 a.m.), etc.

Seed packets seemed easier to ship than songbirds. “I myself can’t speak to whether this will work or not,” Mr. Foer said over the phone from his new house in Brookline Village, Mass. “I don’t have a memory of anybody writing me and saying they actually made this successfully.”

­

I finally found the working innersprings for an American flower clock in a place where I often go for personal guidance: the “Transactions of the Annual Meetings of the Kansas Academy of Science.” (The publication is still in print, if you’re looking for “Observations of the Nine-Banded Armadillo in Northeastern and Central Kansas.”) There, in 1890, a botanist named B. B. Smyth published a plant list based on prairie-flower studies.

Was it reliable chronometry or more doggerel? Smyth’s obituary recounts that after a single year of college (“Michigan Normal at Ypsilanti”), he became an authority on mathematics, geology and botany. This makes him either a polymath or a prairie charlatan in the mold of the traveling professor from “The Wizard of Oz.”

Ms. Sifton, from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, liked the American tilt of the professor’s list. “He’s got a lot of cacti here,” she said, which she also grows in Brooklyn.

Then I brought in a ringer: Claudia West, a landscape designer and ecologist for the perennial plant company North Creek Nurseries. Ms. West, 31, had the advantage of growing up on a family nursery in Germany, where Linnaean flower clocks (Blumenuhrs) are something of a cultural tradition, and occasionally pop up in parks.

You probably wouldn’t want to use this flower clock to catch the 6:52 a.m. Metro-North from Scarsdale. But then, Mr. Hachadourian said: “The way a gardener looks at time is very different. You look at growing seasons: spring and fall. How long it takes a vegetable to reach maturity. Whether you have two more hours after dark to finish weeding. I don’t think of horticulturists as clock-watchers.”

Put another way, who stands outside for hours, gazing at a starflower instead of a Samsung Galaxy? When you’re stalking a hawkweed at daybreak, time is an afterthought.

The flower clocks below follow Linnaeus’s original scheme and the suggestions of modern horticulturists for Eastern Standard Time. For Eastern Daylight Time, set the flowers forward one hour.

Tragopogon pratensis. Credit Minnesota Wildflowers

3 to 5 a.m.

Linnaean Time (opening): Tragopogon pratensis (yellow goatsbeard or Jack-go-to-bed-at-noon). This aster-family weed (or nonnative wildflower, if you prefer) looks like a dandelion’s big brother. Marc Hachadourian, from the New York Botanical Garden, said, “People see that on the side of the road and they say, ‘Look at the size of that seed head!' ”

Eastern Standard Time (opening): Ipomoea spp. (morning glory). Melanie Sifton, from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, favors a dark pink Japanese cultivar called Chocolate. (Note: “The flowers are actually poisonous!” she said.)

Sources: Goatsbeard: look for it in a ditch along the interstate. Ipomoea nil Chocolate: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, rareseeds.com.

Hieracium umbellatum. Credit Minnesota Wildflowers

6 to 8 a.m.

Linnaean Time (opening): Hieracium umbellatum (Canadian hawkweed). Ms. Sifton described this 1- to 4-foot-tall wildflower as “a little like a smaller, less dense sunflower.”

Eastern Standard Time (opening): Callirhoe involucrata (purple poppy mallow). The purple poppy mallow, a native perennial, forms a kind of matting ground cover, said Claudia West, of North Creek Nurseries. The flowers, she said, are “the hottest pink you can imagine.”

Sources: Canadian hawkweed and purple poppy mallow: Prairie Moon Nursery, 866-417-8156, prairiemoon.com.

Hibiscus moscheutos. Credit North Creek Nurseries

9 to 11 a.m.

Linnaean Time (closing): Lactuca sativa (garden lettuce). Once lettuce bolts — that is, flowers — the leaves become bitter. “How many people would even know or recognize what a lettuce flower looks like?” Ms. Sifton said. For the leaves, at least, the century-old children’s garden often chooses Black-Seeded Simpson and Deer Tongue.

Eastern Standard Time (opening): Hibiscus moscheutos (swamp rose mallow). The crenellated flowers of this native open and wither in a single day. But at four inches across, and bright white, they’re hard to miss. Ms. West sometimes spots the head-high plants growing around brackish waters in Maryland.

Sources: Lettuce (Black Seeded Simpson, Deer Tongue and some 150 other varieties): Johnny’s Selected Seeds, 877-564-6697, johnnyseeds.com. Hibiscus moscheutos: J. L. Hudson, Seedsman, jlhudsonseeds.net.

Phemeranthus teretifolius. Credit Mt. Cuba Center

Noon to 2 p.m.

Linnaean Time (closing): Sonchus palustris (marsh sow thistle). A weedy aster from north of the border that could pass for a dandelion.

Eastern Standard Time (opening): Phemeranthus teretifolius (quill fameflower). This Appalachian native takes its name, “phemeranthus,” from the ephemerality of its flower. Each bloom lasts but a day. That said, a single succulent may open 100 flowers. An almost rootless rock-dweller in the wild, the quill fameflower is a “fantastic plant for green roofs,” Ms. West said. The very similar Phemeranthus calycinus is easier to find in nurseries.

Sources: Sonchus palustris: a ditch by the side of the road — in Ontario. Phemeranthus teretifolius: Alplains Seed Catalog, alplains.com.

Escobaria vivipara. Credit High Country Gardens

3 to 5 p.m.

Linnaean Time (closing): Leontodon hispidus (rough hawkbit) or L. autumnale (autumn hawkbit). O.K., this one must be the classic dandelion, right? Wrong again. The hawkbits (naturalized in New York) have small bracts on the stem!

Eastern Standard Time (opening): Escobaria vivipara (spinystar). The obvious choice here is Mirabilis jalapa, the common four-o’clock. But the Kansas botanist B. B. Smyth also recommended a Great Plains and Western pincushion cactus for his 1890 flower clock. Like a lazy sales clerk, the magenta flower opens sometime after 2 p.m. and closes up shop around 5 p.m. It reopens the next afternoon.

Sources: Leontodon spp.: Jelitto Perennial Seeds, 502-895-0807, jelitto.com. Spinystar (in a 2.5-inch pot): High Country Gardens, 800-925-9387, highcountrygardens.com.

Nymphaea odorata. Credit Shooting Star Nursery

6 to 8 p.m.

Linnaean Time (closing): Nymphaea alba (European white waterlily). It appears your flower clock will need a pond, or at least a decent fountain. Linnaeus actually put the closing time in the 5 o’clock hour. That’s fine. Though botanists have long studied waterlilies for their daily flowering routine, Mr. Hachadourian questioned whether they actually close like clockwork.

Eastern Standard Time (opening): Oenothera fruticosa (sundrops or narrowleaf evening primrose). Ms. West noted that this native “will grow on just about any soil,” including dry urban sites. “The only concern is that it does like to spread from seed.” You’ve been warned. The brilliant yellow flowers should wilt before sunrise.

Sources: Waterlily (Nymphaea odorata, a more available native American relative): Shooting Star Nursery, 866-405-7979, shootingstarnursery.com. Oenothera fruticosa seed: Specialty Perennials, 952-432-8673, hardyplants.com. Or Oenothera fruticosa Fireworks plant: Plant Delights Nursery, 919-772-4794, plantdelights.com

Oenothera fruticosa. Credit Maine Natural History Observatory

9 to 11 p.m.

Linnaean Time: Sleep. Linnaeus’s 1751 flower clock ends at 8 p.m. Ms. Sifton commented: “He didn’t have any plants that would bloom in the afternoon or evening. I suppose Northern European plants don’t really behave that way.”

Eastern Standard Time (opening): Ipomoea alba (moonflower). Professor Smyth, in Kansas, observed that this moth-pollinated vine blooms at 9 p.m. Seems a little late. Whenever it happens to occur, Ms. Sifton said, the five-inch-diameter moonflower puts on a show. In less than a minute, “You can see it open right before your eyes.”

Sources: Ipomoea alba: Swallowtail Garden Seeds, 877-489-7333, swallowtailgardenseeds.com.

Ipomoea alba. Credit Swallowtail Garden Seeds

Midnight to 2 a.m.

Eastern Standard Time (closing): Selenicereus grandiflorus (queen of the night). This queen of the night blooms just once a year (though over a series of days). The extravagant white flower — up to a foot in diameter – opens at night. And then it flops over before morning. As a tropical cactus, the queen of the night is more of a houseplant in the north. But if you’re going to get up to see the morning glories open at 4 a.m., you should be home in bed.

Source: Selenicereus grandiflorus: Trade Winds Fruit, tradewindsfruit.com.

For Black History Month: Delighting our Children

Surprise your young ones this Black History Month, with a gift of new books that tell stories they can relate to, filled with characters that look like them!

I recently overheard a concerned woman speaking of how much she is enjoying reading to her young grandchildren. She was describing her search for books to read to her one and two year old grandchildren. 

What a pleasure it was to recommend EsoWon Books as a source for books to support her effort to inspire her infants with a love of reading. EsoWon sends out regular email newsletters, filled with their latest book offerings, and the wonderful authors they present in the store. You definitely want to subscribe.

And wouldn't you know it, I was able to forward to her the email I'd just received presenting books for the youth! Reviews of the books were written Ebony Elizabeth Thomas a University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education assistant professor and co-editor of "Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era." 

Please visit EsoWon Books online and purchase these and other selections from them. They are located in Los Angeles, CA, in Leimert Park.

http://www.esowonbookstore.com/ 

lovu,

Kendke

 

An especially good piece in the LA Times brings the spotlight of Black History Month and new Children's Literature.  Read it below.

4327 Degnan Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90008 323-290-1048

Four children's books introduce African American experiences

Come to EsoWon and Make a Purchase Today.  Give these books as Black History Month Gifts and treat a young person to an exciting journey into American History.

Picture books are often the primary means through which young children in the United States first learn about our nation's history. Telling stories about traumatic past events can prove challenging, though. How can we inspire young people from all backgrounds while being honest about the pain and the hope of the African American story? Taking up this charge, four new picture books by award-winning authors and illustrators introduce slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights movement to a new generation.

Set in Huntsville, Ala., during the 1960s, Hester Bass' "Seeds of Freedom" (Candlewick: 32 pp., $16.99, ages 5-8) begins by contrasting future possibilities with past injustices: "As the first American astronaut orbits around the Earth, black men, women, and children circle around the courthouse, wearing signs that say things like "I Ordered a Hamburger, They Served Me a Warrant!"

The 1962 arrests of three young black women after they ordered lunch in a white establishment set off a series of protests in Huntsville, Ala., - from a Blue Jean Economic Sunday economic boycott to a "Please Support Freedom" balloon launch. E.B. Lewis' illustrations highlight the contrast between the relatively peaceful integration of Huntsville, King's nonviolent March on Washington, D.C., and comparatively violent incidents in Birmingham, Ala., and serve as an eerie echo of today's "Black Lives Matter" protests.

Faith Ringgold's "Harlem Renaissance Party" (Amistad: 40 pp., $17.99, ages 4-8) is a fantastic voyage to one of the brightest periods of black history. Young Lonnie and his Uncle Bates fly the fictional Harlem Airlines back through time and encounter luminaries from W.E.B. DuBois to Langston Hughes.

Representing famous figures from this period of African American history as giants through her lyrical prose and iconic illustrations, Ringgold transports readers from the sidelines of a Marcus Garvey parade to the Schomburg library where Zora Neale Hurston reads folklore from "Mules and Men." Next, Lonnie and his uncle breeze through Madam C.J. Walker's beauty school and enjoy a Paul Robeson play. Their magical day ends with a Josephine Baker dance party. This picture book stands on its own as a fun read and could easily be paired with other books about individual notables of interest from the period.

 

"Real freedom means 'rithmetic and writing": Connections between literacy and liberation emanate from each page of husband and wife author-illustrator team Lesa Cline-Ransome and James E. Ransome's "Freedom's School" (Jump at the Sun/Disney: 32 pp., $17.99, ages 6-8).

In the years immediately after the Emancipation Proclamation, young narrator Lizzie is hungry to learn, and her hunger is nurtured at home, in school and by her neighbors. Arson disrupts her ordinary life, leaving Lizzie's community devastated. Lizzie's teacher is prominent in the foreground of the spread featuring the burning school, doubled over and weeping. Boys throw pails of water on the fire, while adult men, carrying two pails each, seem to pause as they recognize the futility of their mission.

The cause of the fire is not directly stated, but in the left background, a white man on horseback peers at the scene, his eyes shadowed by the brim of his hat. Lizzie's family and neighbors work together to rebuild the school, demonstrating the strength and resilience of this black community.

Ann Turner's attempt to render Sojourner Truth's life in her own words in "My Name Is Truth: The Life of Sojourner Truth" (HarperCollins: 40 pp., $17.99, ages 6-8) is commendable. But there seems to be a mismatch between Turner's bold free verse and James Ransome's gently drawn illustrations. 

For instance, in one spread, the text reads: "I got bought for $100 when I was nine / at least they spoke my home tongue, Dutch." Truth continues, "next place (I was bigger now, worth $150) / they did not speak words I knew / I was always getting beat." In the foreground, two white men face each other with closed mouths; one is clutching a handful of bills, while the other's hands are folded behind his back. In the background, Truth stands with eyes closed and a calm expression on her face. She is surrounded by sheep and stands against a backdrop of neatly plowed fields.

There is little sense of Truth's reality in this illustration, no hint that her owner once disconcertingly "fired up a bunch of green sticks in the fire hardened like stone / and beat me until the blood ran." While this picture book features several high points (including a brilliant montage showing Truth's journey to freedom) and includes a helpful biography in the endpapers, young readers may be left with considerable confusion about the significance of some events. "My Name is Truth" would work best paired with other books for this age group about Truth's life as well as picture books about slavery in general.

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education and is co-editor of "Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era."

Getting you Ready for Celebrating the Evolution and History of People of African Descent Globally

Third World - You've Got the Power (To Make a Change)





And how? And how many ways do I love you....?

Our Changing Cities

The part of town where you live—and especially where you grew up—can profoundly affect lifetime earnings.

How Your Neighborhood Affects Your Paycheck

• Richard Florida
• @Richard_Florida
• Jan 16, 2016

“[A] as I check off my list of privileges, I won’t forget the biggest of them all: my passport,” economist Tim Harford wrote recently in the Financial Times. He's not wrong: In today’s increasingly spiky world, where financial and social advantage is clustered and concentrated in specific places, the country in which you’re born obviously affects the opportunities you will be presented with later in life. But it’s not just the country—or even the city—in which you’re born that matters, according to a growing body of research. Neighborhood matters just as much, if not more.

A city is not a single, unitary thing, but a collection of neighborhoods. And we know that the outcomes among children who grow up in poor neighborhoods, those with under-performing schools, under-prepared peers and less access to high-quality libraries or museums, are often very different than those who grow up in wealthier areas. These early differences can not only contribute to inequality in terms of wages and income, but also what Stanford University economist Rebecca Diamond calls “inequality of well-being,” where neighborhoods that house high shares of high-skilled workers not only have more money, but also better amenities, like grocery stores and schools. Diamond’s well-being inequality gap, she finds, is 20 percent higher than what can be explained by the wage gap between college and high school grads.

This is what social scientists have dubbed the “neighborhood effect,” and two recent studies give us a better understanding of exactly how it works.
The first [PDF], by Princeton University sociologist Douglas Massey and Jonathan Rothwell, an economist with the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, examines how the neighborhood in which one lives for the first 16 years of life affects future income between the ages of 30 and 44. The study, which was published recently in the journal Economic Geography*, used data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics collected by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, which has tracked a nationally representative sample of individuals and families since 1968.
Numerous studies have already accounted for the ways in which parents have a profound effect on the economic futures of their children. But Massey and Rothwell hypothesize that the characteristics of neighborhoods have an effect on future earnings independent of the well-established roles of factors like parents' income or education.

The neighborhood effect creates a lifetime earnings gap nearly as large as that between a college and high school graduate.

 

Their results are striking. Rothwell and Massey find the neighborhood effect to be 50 to 66 percent of the effect of parental income. This means, as they write, “growing up in a poor neighborhood would wipe out much of the advantage of growing up in a wealthy household.” They dub this the “million dollar neighborhood effect,” finding that lifetime earnings are roughly $900,000 higher (or $730,000 in net present value terms) for those who grow up in the richest 20 percent of neighborhoods than for those who grow up in the bottom 20 percent, even after corrected for parental income. As they note, this effect creates a difference nearly as large as that between a college and high school graduate, which the Census Bureau estimates to be roughly $1 million dollars in lifetime earnings.

This neighborhood effect becomes even starker when Rothwell and Massey take cost of living into account. Money goes much further in, say, Des Moines than it does in New York, as they point out. So the researchers built a local price index using housing rental prices and ran their numbers back through their intergenerational mobility models. Their results are depicted in the chart below, from the Brookings Institution:

Of course, the neighborhood effect is also associated with a host of other variables, race chief among them. Massey and Rothwell use two Census tract-based data points to determine the neighborhood effect of racial composition. They find that both variables and the neighborhood effect by themselves are significant in predicting future earnings. But they also find that the neighborhood effect is the most explanatory of the three. As they note, “It thus appears that the lower intergenerational income mobility of African Americans can be explained by their disproportionate segregation in poor, disadvantaged areas.”

*****

A second study [PDF] by my Martin Prosperity Institute colleagues Charlotta Mellander, Kevin Stolarick and José Lobo examines how neighborhood location affects the money people make. The study looks at the effects of residential neighborhoods and workplace neighborhoods on individuals’ incomes in Sweden between 2002 and 2011. Sweden has unusually detailed micro-data that enable the researchers to study the connections between firms, neighborhoods and individual earnings over time in a systematic way. The data include roughly 22 million observations over this 10-year period.
This study employs the concept of “neighborhood effects” in a somewhat different way: Where sociologists focus on the ways one’s early neighborhood conditions affect life outcomes, Mellander and company examine the way that the locations where one works and resides affects current income.

Neighborhoods have a very different effect on the incomes of blue collar and service workers as compared to knowledge and creative workers. 

 

The researchers set out to, in their words, “examine which social community most affects an individual’s productivity.” Their models probe the effect of neighborhood location and workplace on the wages of higher skill knowledge and creative workers versus less-skilled blue collar and service workers, while controlling for education, gender, marital status and other factors.

The big takeaway: Neighborhoods have a very different effect on the incomes of blue collar and service workers as compared to knowledge and creative workers. First, residential neighborhoods have a relatively bigger effect on the incomes of blue collar and service workers. This, the researchers suggest, may be because these workers are more likely to “network” with friends and neighbors to find good jobs.

But residential neighborhood location matters less to knowledge and creative workers, whose incomes are affected more by their workplaces.  Additionally, creative and knowledge workers receive a clearer income boost from being employed in a workplace within a creative cluster, perhaps because these clusters are also where “they can change jobs frequently, and where firms compete for some talent.”

*****

For decades, urban economists have compared the relative economic performances of cities and metro regions. But this type of research seeks to get inside those cities and metro areas and examine the powerful roles played by neighborhoods. This work is essential to understanding why certain places grow while others do not, and how the powerful divides and segregations within our cities can and will echo into the future. 

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The Prescient

 
This electrifying speech of Dr. King reveals his dazzling mastery. His astuteness of global, spiritual, historical and political events and philosophies is truly awesome. He clearly outlines the immoral and bankrupt  policies and practices America pursued in Vietnam. Though he speaks of a war, a disaster that occurred decades ago, the networks of thought and beliefs in pursuit of greed, power and domination still fester, flare up and reach and entangle all on the planet today.  So listening to his words brings greater clarity about the 'now' moment we're experiencing.

Demonstrating his gifts of prophesy, he describes the world that we live in today. And we must love him, for he is one that never just delivers the bad or negative knewz. Dr. King always has suggestions, fresh options and inspiration, and ways as he says here, "...that we may reorder our priorities".

Our hearts are inspired to listen to and act from the dictates of our own conscience on this celebration of his 86th day of birth. When you have time Click this link, where you can both read and hear his powerful voice, once again speak truth to power. It's well worth the time to reach the last portion of his message, where his words are absolutely profound.
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_beyond_vietnam/
lovu, Kendke

What Happens When Society Allows Policy to Be Set by Those Lacking Life Experience

Google got it wrong.   The open-office trend is destroying the workplace.

Workplaces need more walls, not fewer.

By Lindsey Kaufman December 30, 2014

A year ago, my boss announced that our large New York ad agency would be moving to an open office. After nine years as a senior writer, I was forced to trade in my private office for a seat at a long, shared table. It felt like my boss had ripped off my clothes and left me standing in my skivvies.

Our new, modern Tribeca office was beautifully airy, and yet remarkably oppressive. Nothing was private. On the first day, I took my seat at the table assigned to our creative department, next to a nice woman who I suspect was an air horn in a former life.  All day, there was constant shuffling, yelling, and laughing, along with loud music piped through a PA system.  As an excessive water drinker, I feared my co-workers were tallying my frequent bathroom trips.  At day’s end, I bid adieu to the 12 pairs of eyes I felt judging my 5:04 p.m. departure time. I beelined to the Beats store to purchase their best noise-cancelling headphones in an unmistakably visible neon blue.

Despite its obvious problems, the open-office model has continued to encroach on workers across the country. Now, about 70 percent of U.S. offices have no or low partitions, according to the International Facility Management Association. Silicon Valley has been the leader in bringing down the dividers. Google, Yahoo, eBay, Goldman Sachs and American Express are all adherents.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg enlisted famed architect Frank Gehry to design the largest open floor plan in the world, housing nearly 3,000 engineers. And as a businessman, Michael Bloomberg was an early adopter of the open-space trend, saying it promoted transparency and fairness. He famously carried the model into city hall when he became mayor of New York,  making “the Bullpen” a symbol of open communication and accessibility to the city’s chief.

These new floor plans are ideal for maximizing a company’s space while minimizing costs. Bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on their employees, ensuring clandestine porn-watching, constant social media-browsing and unlimited personal cellphone use isn’t occupying billing hours.

But employers are getting a false sense of improved productivity. A 2013 study found that many workers in open offices are frustrated by distractions that lead to poorer work performance. Nearly half of the surveyed workers in open offices said the lack of sound privacy was a significant problem for them and more than 30 percent complained about the lack of visual privacy.

Meanwhile, “ease of interaction” with colleagues — the problem that open offices profess to fix — was cited as a problem by fewer than 10 percent of workers in any type of office setting. In fact, those with private offices were least likely to identify their ability to communicate with colleagues as an issue. In a previous study, researchers concluded that “the loss of productivity due to noise distraction … was doubled in open-plan offices compared to private offices.”

The New Yorker, in a review of research on this nouveau workplace design, determined that the benefits in building camaraderie simply mask the negative effects on work performance. While employees feel like they’re part of a laid-back, innovative enterprise, the environment ultimately damages workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction.

Furthermore, a sense of privacy boosts job performance, while the opposite can cause feelings of helplessness. In addition to the distractions, my colleagues and I have been more vulnerable to illness. Last flu season took down a succession of my co-workers like dominoes.

As the new space intended, I’ve formed interesting, unexpected bonds with my cohorts. But my personal performance at work has hit an all-time low. Each day, my associates and I are seated at a table staring at each other, having an ongoing 12-person conversation from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.  It’s like being in middle school with a bunch of adults. Those who have worked in private offices for decades have proven to be the most vociferous and rowdy. 

They haven’t had to consider how their loud habits affect others, so they shout ideas at each other across the table and rehash jokes of yore. As a result, I can only work effectively during times when no one else is around, or if I isolate myself in one of the small, constantly sought-after, glass-windowed meeting rooms around the perimeter.

If employers want to make the open-office model work, they have to take measures to improve work efficiency. For one, they should create more private areas — ones without fishbowl windows.  Also, they should implement rules on when interaction should be limited. For instance, when a colleague has on headphones, it’s a sign that you should come back another time or just send an e-mail.  And please, let’s eliminate the music that blankets our workspaces.  Metallica at 3 p.m. isn’t always compatible with meeting a 4 p.m. deadline.

On the other hand, companies could simply join another trend — allowing employees to work from home. That model has proven to boost productivity, with employees working more hours and taking fewer breaks. On top of that, there are fewer interruptions when employees work remotely. At home, my greatest distraction is the refrigerator.  ​

Lindsey Kaufman works in advertising and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her personal essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Our Town Downtown and xoJane.

A New Way of Thinking About Retirement

Moment to moment, live your Life fully, Being your Best,
Giving your Best. If you want to be a magnet for the
Best Life offers, with joyful thanks, keep your focus only
on the infinite possibilities for your Good that surround you. 

Kicking off 2015 with this refreshing and interesting article that deals with a topic that often causes anxiety and fear. What do I do when I retire, or I'm unemployed??? 

The New York Times article shares some great examples of how others are now 'playing' with the idea of retirement. As with everything the concept of retirement, and then how it materializes in real life, is constantly changing. The way I see it, when you get to that point, it's another chance for you to have some fun with your imagination, creativity, talents and long cherished dreams. If you read the previous post, then you know what happens when you "Free your mind"......

Whether you're a Baby Boomer, or forty years younger and wanting your Beloved parents not to miss out on any of their dreams, this article offers a lot of food for thought, and can be the beginning of some great conversations. That is, if we speak, from the Truth of our Heart.

lovu,

Kendke

Easing Into Leisure, One Step at a Time

At 54, Jack M. Guttentag decided to downsize. His children had grown, and he and his wife thought they should prepare for the future and move from their townhouse in Philadelphia to something countrified, a few dozen miles west in Valley Forge, Pa.

“I wasn’t quite thinking about retirement, but looking toward that time,” said Mr. Guttentag, known as the Mortgage Professor. He has long worked in that financing field as a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and has an advice website of the same name.

That was 37 years ago. Mr. Guttentag is 91 now, and last year, having been an emeritus professor since 1996, he and his wife decided to downsize again. They moved halfway back toward Philadelphia and into a one-story retirement facility with some good amenities like a movie theater, a pool and a physical fitness center with two instructors.

“Now we want to be closer to the city and the things to do there,” Mr. Guttentag said, adding that he no longer wanted to mow the lawn — or even find anyone to do it.

Mr. Guttentag is part of what some see as a growing trend toward retiring and downsizing in steps.

In an earlier generation, people tended to do it all at once — and only once — typically either retiring in place or selling a house and moving to a resort area to play golf and mingle with others their age.

Now an overwhelming number of older people are taking a more gradual approach, downsizing a family home and full-time career but not abandoning work or a familiar region altogether.

Rather than seeking refuge in faraway warmer climates, large numbers tend to want to stay in the neighborhoods they have lived in for a long time — even if they do move around within the area in the short term.

A survey by the AARP’s Public Policy Institute found that 87 percent of those age 65 and older, and 71 percent of those 50 to 64, preferred to stay close to their longtime neighborhoods and were not making the traditional choice of packing up and moving to a resort area.

As people live longer — and are healthier and more productive as they age — the opportunity to retire and downsize multiple times increases, said Rodney Harrell, the director of livable communities for the AARP institute.

“The trend has started with those who are older now,” Mr. Harrell said, adding, “We don’t yet know how it will be for the entire Baby Boom.”

But there are signs that the more gradual approach involving multiple moves is becoming established behavior.

“They are going to want the same things that, frankly, people of a wide range of ages want: safe communities, transportation, parks and so forth,” Mr. Harrell said, referring to those at or near retirement age today. “But it may be in different ways over a longer span of time than their parents.”

Ira and Carol Barrows are a classic case. Life was going well for the couple while in their late 50s. Ira had cut back his law practice and was helping manage his brother’s restaurant, while Carol was still enjoying her career as a teacher.

Then she got an opportunity to teach for two years in one of their favorite vacation spots, Hanoi, Vietnam. They sold their home in Doylestown, Pa., and took the adventure that they had assumed would lead them into retirement afterward.

When they returned to the United States, they bought a home in Hershey, Pa., where several of Carol’s relatives lived. It was smaller and — because it was farther from the city — much less expensive.

Somehow, though, a life without work and without a full income — Ms. Barrows had a pension, but they were a few years short of full Social Security benefits — was unsatisfying to the couple, who loved theater, opera and upscale restaurants.

So they took jobs in security and hospitality in — surprising, even to them — Hersheypark, the amusement park and its sports arena.

“We said we would do it for a while and see how it worked out,” Mr. Barrows, now 69, said. “When it is your ‘retirement job,’ we found it was easier to negotiate what would be rough patches.”

For five years, they each worked about 1,000 hours annually until, finally, last spring, the idea of real retirement took hold.

“It was fun a lot of the time. We were named the outstanding employees one year. We got to go to concerts and hockey games for free. It was a good transition,” he said. “Downsizing twice wasn’t what we planned, but it turned out better than we could have thought.”

Olivia S. Mitchell, a professor at the Wharton School and executive director of its Pension Research Council, said two-step retirement may be more common in the baby boom generation because of several factors.

First of all, she said, there are more two-earner families doing significant work. In past generations, even if the wife worked, it was probably in something she would quit when her husband retired.

Now, more women hold jobs they may find “aspirational,” Professor Mitchell said, and may want to stay with them, thus delaying a final major downsizing and having an interim one instead.

“I do a lot of work with people who are just finding ways not to run out of money,” she said. “With people living longer, that is a concern, so maybe they retire, then downsize, then go back to work, then retire again.

“Or, on the other hand, people may feel their mortality and just jump on something for a while before really downsizing,” she said.

For Stu Alexander and his wife, Dierdre Kaye, this gradual approach to a full retirement has become a long-term lifestyle. They had already moved once and changed careers. In 1996, when they were both 46, they left Minnesota for Arizona and, giving up their former careers as a state recreation director and a sales executive, started writing, directing and acting, eventually opening up their own theater.

“We thought we would do this for 10 or 15 years and then really retire,” said Mr. Alexander. But in October 2012, at a seniors softball tournament, he went through a complimentary health screening that showed an elevated blood sugar level. When he returned home, his doctor told him he had diabetes, and a month later, short of breath on a hike, he found he had clogged arteries and soon had triple-bypass heart surgery.

“When I recovered, there was no thought but to really live out our dream before anything else happened,” he said. For the last two years, they have traveled in their recreational vehicle around North America for six months at a time, alternating with six months at home in Arizona. It’s a schedule they hope to maintain over the next eight years.

They travel slowly and tow a compact car that they can use for day trips around whatever campground they have chosen. Mr. Alexander has long been a self-described baseball fanatic, so they plan to catch games in all 30 major league parks by the end of this year, their third on this retirement voyage.

“When we’re done, we’ll be 72. That should be the time we’ll be slowing down for real,” said Mr. Alexander, who still writes, particularly about his travels. “I guess we will have retired three times in a way, one step at a time.”