Two Cool Stories from BoingBoing

You know I always love new ways of mapping and mashing up data. Must be that cartography class I took in college.

The folks at Chicago's Center for Neighborhood Technology have come up with a cool mapping tool that takes any metropolitan area in the U.S. and shows where the affordable housing is (where affordable is defined as housing that costs 30% of the median income or less). And then they combine it with information on transportation costs -- so that the map shows where the affordable housing plus affordable transportation is located (defined as 48% of median income or less). And surprise -- a lot of those suburban areas that people move to to find an "affordable" house are no longer affordable when transportation cost is factored in.

On an entirely different subject, columnist Lenore Skenazy has started a blog called Free Range Kids that advocates what should probably be obvious... that kids need the chance to be independent before they will become independent.

This is something I've mentally struggled with as a parent. The anxiety created by the constant media din about child abduction and murder makes it hard to reflect statistical reality in my everyday parenting practice. Such as the fact that kids growing up in the 1950s were about three times as likely to die from misadventure as kids today.

The site includes an open comment area for and against Free Range Kids (you can tell it's open, since the first comment is simply "Dumbass!") and a discussion page asking people to recall what their own childhoods were like. I, for one, was definitely a free range kid. But almost everyone I knew was, also.

The site also links to some of her columns in the New York Sun, including one that's related to the topic but goes even a bit farther: Buy a Cell Phone, Become a Baby makes the case that adults are infantalized by having cell phones almost as much as kids. Good point.

Both these items are from boingboing.net.