Here is an interesting question. Let's say you have a road, 4 lanes, 2.13 miles in length. The road is fairly wide and straight (as well it should be, only being 2.13 miles long). Now on that road we are going to put two Elementary Schools and one large water park, with huge grass areas for children and families to play and picnic. The rest of this road is going to be framed by family housing, with children playing in the yards and dogs running about on sunny days.

How fast should you be driving down this road?

I'm not sure what your answer was, but I'll bet it wasn't 50 mph. However, that is the answer the Traffic and Safety Commission were proposing at the meeting on Jan 10th to the Carlsbad City Council, and if four concerned citizens didn't show up to that meeting, that proposal might have been listened to, instead of being sent back.

You might ask yourself, why only four showed up? That part is easy, none of the residents in that area were informed of the meeting, or the proposed speed limit. In fact the only warning issued was from the North County Times the day before.

Continued Here -> »

Example-News Story

No Comments »

The City Council of Carlsbad received a wakeup call in January. The recently formed group called the Concerned Citizens for Carlsbad, and their lawyer Peter Lind, forced the issue through a Public Records Act request for the private talks regarding the Strawberry Fields development plans to be made public, and the records of those talks to be published. Carlsbad City has complied and stated that these were only preliminary talks, and there were no deals or plans being made; just ideas floating around, and creative options being explored.

While this may be true, detailed plans were being created, and the meetings which prompted these plans under the guidance of Sterling Consulting came at the cost of $150,000.00. The City of Carlsbad states that no public officials have been in these meetings, so they are not a real concern, however the point was made that activities like this tend to gain momentum after a while and become official simply because of the mass and inertia they have accumulated. 150k for coffee and some drawings, seems like a good start down that road of mass and inertia.

Continued Here -> »

Example-News Story

1 Comment »

Nature.com is reporting on a study by Canadian researcher Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University that visitors to a webpage can make up their minds about the quality of the page within just 50 milliseconds." From the article: "We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgments almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. The discovery came as a surprise to some experts. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa, who has published the research in the journal Behaviour and Information Technology. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.

Glenn's Desk

No Comments »