Several organizations in Northeast Ohio have wrangled with the concept of educational reform for decades, yet we have only seen incremental improvements over the years. More recently, change efforts have been ramped up, with survey and dialog based initiatives such as Voices and Choices and By the People currently in full swing. RealNEO has advocated educational reform since inception and has hosted City Club roundtable forums over the past year to address this very issue. All of these efforts have centered upon core challenges to address and these are as follows:

Saw a link to a personality test over at Japundit, which matches you to a science fiction character. I normally don't do these things, but being a science fiction fan, I figured what the heck, let's give it a whirl.

hmmmm. here are my results.

My daughter is going with her grandmother to The Nutcracker on Saturday night at the Allen Theatre at Playhouse Square. For my daughter, moving to Cleveland will be a huge advantage over Okinawa (Prefecture Government, Tourist Bureau, Wikipedia ) in that she will have vastly more opportunity to see professional performances.

The Cache Shop is a thrift store in the basement of the Church of the Covenant on Euclid Avenue in University Circle. It is open Tuesdays and Thursdays and staffed by some very nice volunteers.They have special tables set up for the holidays with holiday decorations -- some vintage and all very cheap. 

I took the rapid downtown today and walked from public square to the office. Man is it cold.

Over the last nine years I lived in Okinawa, Japan where the absolute coldest it got was 54 degrees. And I notice that Kadena Air Base it is currently 55 degress. In December that is amazingly cold for Okinawa. Normally it doesn't get that cold until January/February timeframe.

Gift giving can take many manifestations, tangible and intantible. The most valuable are sometimes less obvious.  Children, for example, revel in things in which they can participate and activity can assume many guises.  Advertising pushes products or activities but what about unpromoted activites?  The internet offers both small and large entrepreneurs a level playing field by enabling them equal access to consumers.  Thus the internet becomes the zone for entrepreneurs and participation.  Search engines connect everyone to everything, creating great opportunity.  Think how this changes the way children and their parents "shop."  Two things are true: It will never be the same but how and what we "shop" for is still being defined as an extension of the old ways.  Consider this, the early auto-mobiles' design were simply motor-powered carriages.  The same holds for innovation today:  the great spurt in innovation is yet to come, and its arrival will be hastened as more people participate on the internet.  Search engines enable people to leverage their intellectual property by lowering the barriers to consumers' access to products and services.

On November 17 an 18, I participated at the last three meetings regarding ODOT's “Recommended Preferred Alternatives” for the Cleveland Innerbelt Plan. My conclusion is that ODOT must hit the brakes and reconsider the Southern Bridge Alignment Plan (South Bridge) before it is too late... read the whole story at NEO Bridge today!

... http://neobridge.net/blog/ed-hauser

I'm not a fan of the Christmas Story leg lamp, but I thought these sexy little leg earrings were in good taste. I think it was the high quality of the craftsmanship or the beauty of the materials that appealed to me more than the subject, but I thought the concept was clever too. I bought these at the CIA Holiday Sale. I'm not sure who made them -- they did n't include their card with the box and they were not there at the sale. 

Gift giving is the most widespread manifestation of the holiday season. The eternal question: What to give Johnny or Jane?  Mass merchandisers work hard at creating push for their products.  Tie-ins between movies and products, co-branding sports figures and products are examples of the sometimes creative approaches used.  What's too frequently missing from the mix are artisans' works sold through channels that don't promote themselves like mass merchandisers do. 

If you missed seeing Horst and all his gorgeous felt at The Gift Event at Kilgore Trout there is still the holiday sale at the Artcraft Building -- check the realneo events calendar for more details. The latice scarves he made exclusively for the event at Kilgore Trout were so cool!

Change of plans Friday night. I decided to stay in with the snow piling up outside in excess of 10". I searched Ebay for works by my favorite Pop Art artist Claes Oldenberg and found  some interesting things. Many prints, posters and books were affordable. Buyer beware though, Ebay has gotten some bad press lately with that guy who cheated people, supposedly selling Ohio State tickets

Yesterday was thrift store shopping, today will be all about art. Tonight I plan to go to the Cleveland Institute of Art Holiday Sale and the Hodge School Open Studio and Exhibition.

    Some of the artists at the Hodge School will have works for sale -- or maybe you could commission something for that special person on your list? One of my favorite locaI  artists Charmaine Spencer will have her basket weave sculptures for sale. The are so beautiful and very affordable!

I noticed this morning that MM Research Institute of Japan released the recent broadband statistics for Japan. More than 21 million people/organizations now subscribe to broadband access. The bulk of that is ADSL, but close to 4 million are subscribers to fiber-to-the-home. Interestingly enough, I was on the phone until 2AM the other day helping my sister-in-law(yes, she's in Japan) set up here FTTH 100Mbps connection.

Check out these pictures! The Side Door shop at St. Paul's Church (corner of Coventry and Fairmount) is the place for eclectic bargains. I could probably do all my holiday shopping there because there are so many interesting and practical things.

It's December 1st already! Only 24 days to find a special gift for everyone on my list -- and that includes some hard to please friends and relatives. Where do you shop in Cleveland if you hate Walmart and try to avoid the crowds and monotonous merchandise of the malls? There are plenty of galleries, boutiques, books stores, thrift stores and websites with unique gifts and shopping them can help support local artists, entreprenuers and charities.

With great anticipation, I dive into the blogosphere with this initial entry.  My name is Sudhir Raghupathy and I am a recent graduate of the Weatherhead MBA program at Case, with specialties on Entrepreneurship and Organizational Behavior.

Over at BrewedFreshDaily there is a great discussion of Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital. Worth reading through the comments with the exception of one individual whom seems a tad bit warped..

The Cleveland Schools are hosting a series of meetings to generate input from the community on what they want for a CEO. For a school system not always anxious for public input, this is a great way to start a search process.

We have setup a developing/staging site with the latest and greatest. As you have noticed over the last couple of weeks, we have changed some of the styling here at realneo, and we are planning more changes. We will be doing some testing prior to upgrading this site, but we have made some progress.

In my last post, I mentioned that I want to add wiki functionality to this site. Another thing I think this site should have is trackback functionality. The issue with trackbacks, of course, is spam. I am going to turn trackbacks on and see how it goes. If we get too much spam to handle efficiently, I'll turn it back off.

I missed it, but apparently on the Lehrer-Mcneil Report, there was a section on increased individual participation in "journalism", or what they called "We Media". A large piece of the report was focused on wiki technology. Of course they mentioned Wikipedia. Apparently, wikipedia has over 2 billion hits per month. "Subscribers" to wikipedia outnumber the subscribers to the New York Times, Washington Post, the LA Times(and maybe one or two others) combined.

I saw today that Novell will be focusing on GNOME as there Desktop Envirionment for SUSE, etc. Being a KDE fan I was a little disappointed to see that. But in that same article, I saw a link to an item where the founder of Ubuntu, a Debian-based distribution almost soley focused on Gnome, in fact uses Kubuntu, a KDE focused version of Ubuntu. And that in fact that he wanted to see Kubuntu become more mainstream within the Ubuntu organization.

Found an interesting article over at LXer (pronounced Elexer) which posts portions of what is supposedly an internal Intel document suggesting that they will anticipate to sell hundreds of millions of Linux computers in China. From the summary at the top of the article:

Both Mayor Campbell and Council President Jackson met with the arts community last week.  Attendance was low, both at the Play House on the east with Campbell and Cleveland Public Theatre on the westside with Jackson. The Campbell strategy was to identify a top 20 list of reasons Campbell has advanced the arts, with art summits, expansion of live/work zones and public funding through the "1% for arts" set aside that is a part of public construction contracts.  She says her track record merits her return to office for another four years.  Jackson said, through his leadership, he deserves credit for these initiatives as well, and his record in council deserves the public’s faith and confidence that he will work to represent them well.  But what would be an election without an added dose of cynicism? 

Dear Cleveland Citizens,

The future of our great city is highly dependent on the quality of education that our youth receive. If you, like any concerned citizen, are looking for a way to have an impact on the hiring of a new CEO for the Cleveland Municpal School District (CMSD), please download the attached excel spreadsheet which contains a list of the members of the Community Advisory Panel. The members of this panel were appointed by the School Board.