Blacksburg Buzz

TOUGH TIMES for the newspaper business, as the Roanoke Times downsizes a bit. More thoughts on the changing face of local media from Doug Thompson:

This news hits just as The Roanoke Times, my first daily newspaper gig back in the swinging sixties, offers early retirement buyouts to 21 longtime employees (those 58 or older with 15 years or more at the paper). When those longtimers go, the Times will lose whatever real connection it has to the city it covers. Not one member of its editorial staff will be locally born or raised.

and Jerry Fuhrman:

While the editorialists are boneheads, the reporting at the Times is, in my estimation, top notch. Those bringing us the local news, it seems, are the ones who will be affected by this reduction in staff. Speaking from experience, lots of experience, in such circumstances, it’s always those least deserving of punishment that get the axe.

OPEN MIC NIGHT every Monday at the Cellar.

WHEN PEOPLE from Northern Virginia complain that there isn’t enough to do around here, I always assume that they’re talking about things like this novel interpretation of Macbeth, currently curdling audiences in Arlington:

Folks in the front sometimes cringe and move back a few rows during intermission. One man watched the play with a program in front of his eyes, blocking out the lower half of his field of vision.

NEW IMAGING CENTER coming to Montgomery Regional Hospital:

Amid the contemporary furniture and earth-tone walls of the HCA Inc.-owned center, patients will find $3.2 million worth of new MRI and Cat scanners that can detect cancer earlier and perform less invasive tests for some forms of heart disease, said Montgomery Regional Chief Radiologist Dr. Michael Aronson.

Gone, too, will be the dreaded hospital gowns with their sometimes embarrassing gaps.

Frankly, I’ve always found the gowns liberating.

Overlooked in the rising clamor for funded-at-gunpoint healthcare is the basic reality that the cost of medical services, like the cost of gas or cornflakes, goes up as demand outpaces supply. Increasing the supply part of the equation is always a good thing. MRIs likely don’t move the needle much on aggregate measures like national life expectancy, so it isn’t surprising that they are often rationed (e.g., Canada’s infamous two-month wait-time) in situations where providers have no incentive to expand their services.

BOUCHER moves to stop an attempt to outlaw development near the New River.

Here is the text of Burr’s amendment, and some additional coverage from the Galax Gazette. The latter includes the somewhat disconcerting note:

Virginia and federal legislators and local officials did not know of Burr’s measure until learning about a hearing on the measure last week.

A subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee held a hearing May 15.

One wonders how much ill-considered legislation like this slips through, unbeknownst not only to those affected by it, but even by their elected representatives.

FACEBOOK DEMOGRAPHICS for the Roanoke community.

VT students and alum have a large presence on Facebook, but the age discontinuity is quite extreme. Out of those 44,669 Hokies registered on the site, the classes of ‘96 and ‘98 (the two years in which I got degrees) only have 118 and 203 members, respectively. Makes me want to fire up the victrola and spend the afternoon looking through the stereo-opticon.

VIOLIN AND QANÚN: By way of Blacksburg Confidential, An Evening of Middle Eastern Music, coming up later this month in Roanoke. Check out the podcast link for a sample.

More details on the Qanún (Kanun) from Wikipedia.

SHOTS of Wednesday’s fireworks in Christiansburg

IT’S DRY enough that we’ve got a lot of brown grass around the New River Valley, but apparently it is worse to our south. Here’s the latest on regional problems from the National Weather Service, and maps of drought conditions nationwide and state-wide (from the University of Nebraska).

REGIONAL MAINSTREAM MEDIA too rabidly conservative for you? A new alternative newspaper is coming to the NRV’s rescue.

But seriously, it’s nice that various forms of grassroots and freelance journalism are possible these days, both filling in the gaps in local markets and covering things that the legacy media organizations apparently aren’t interested in. (Little things like the war in Iraq, where freelancers such as Michael Yon and Michael Totten provide on-the-ground, outside-the-green-zone coverage that usually puts the networks, wire services, and newspapers to shame.)

LOCAL TRIBUTES to those lost on April 16 continue across the country. Here’s one in Middletown, NY:

Robert Yonskie has been busy this summer organizing a benefit concert for his friend and fellow Minisink Valley High School graduate Caitlin M. Hammaren, who was killed in the Virginia Tech mass shooting earlier this year.

The concert will be at 7:30 p.m. tomorrow at First Congregational Church, 35 E. Main St., Middletown.A free-will offering will be taken, and proceeds will be used to establish a creative arts fund in Caitlin’s name. Yonskie, 20, said the concert “is a tremendous outpouring of love and talent” featuring some of Caitlin’s fellow Minisink Valley graduates.

A REMINDER of what a horrible idea red-light cameras^* are.

We are fortunate to live in a nation with a common law heritage, which allows a bit of “slippage” in situations like getting through a changing traffic light. The camera makes the law (or, at least, the perception thereof) much more rigid: Being in a particular spot at a particular time, regardless of other circumstances, becomes a violation. It should not be surprising that instinct causes people to take extraordinary measures to not be in that spot.

The cameras are installed in Blacksburg, legal in Virginia (as of March 23), and in the town’s comprehensive plan:

Implement video red light enforcement at intersections throughout Town that have been identified as having a high occurrence of red-light runners.

The Town’s 2007-2008 Adopted Operating Budget (PDF format, dated July 1, 2007) lists this item as “remaining to be completed”. This suggests a sad irony: Since the behavioral changes that lead to more accidents are based on the perceived threat of a ticket, we may well have the situation where safety has been reduced with absolutely no benefit to anybody.

In addition to safetey issues, this editorial in the CT last year, before the law was changed, notes some of the perverse incentives:

Red light cameras would be no different in that they are cash cows for revenue-strapped localities. Washington, D.C. collects over $16 million from its red light cameras, New York City at least $9 million. Also, the camera manufacturers frequently get a cut of the fines issued. Do we really want even more corporations in bed with government?

^*Traffic cameras, that is — not cameras in red-light districts. To my knowledge, no studies of the latter have been done.

DIGITAL BAZAAR has an interesting approach to managing intellectual property:

Digital Bazaar, the Blacksburg, VA based company that created Bitmunk, says “… once you buy a song from the network, you can re-sell that song to anybody else on the network for a small profit. We’ve created a very symbiotic relationship between the labels, artists, distributors and fans - one where everyone has an incentive to participate.”

Read the whole thing at “Bitmunk Creates Push-Pull Social Vintage Store“. The company’s home page is here.

DIXIE POWER TRIO, “a dixieland band that plays rock and roll”, will perform tommorrow on the Henderson Lawn at 6pm. Here’s more on the four-man trio.

A BRIEF HERPETOLOGY LESSON for Pandapas Pond visitors.

Perhaps the turtles would fare better if they had a bunch of equipment strapped to their backs.