great news from Tremont

Plain Press: The Community Newspaper Serving Cleveland's West Side Neighborhoods -- great article here about Sammy Catania providing new leadership at the Tremont nonprofit, news about reinvolving the neighbors, expanding wi-fi using local contractors, security cameras to enhance safety, branding with a logo that sounds attractive and cool, fostering transparency and communication, building out the community, strengthening the networks already there. This bears watching, perhaps emulating.

alternative investments and a moral imperative

For Yale’s Money Man, a Higher Calling - New York Times -- Here's a good read about a guy who revolutionized portfolio management in general by looking beyond the traditional mix of stocks and bonds, making Yale's endowment the standard against which all others are measured. The article also gives you a glimpse of the philosophy behind Yale, and an idea of why so many Yale graduates focus on quality of life issues and wind up in positions of public service. Around here, a cataloguing of Yalies who serve includes the Morrison brothers, Ed and Hunter; David Pogue; Sherrod Brown; and Oliver "Pudge" Henkel. On a national level, we have Garry Trudeau and Sir John Templeton, William F. Buckley and Bill Clinton, George Pataki, and the current president and his most recent competitor. It seems to be an interesting school, and Mr. Swenson has made it possible for everybody who qualifies to receive an education there. It's a long article, but take time to read the whole thing. Here's the section on the move to alternative investments:

Yale has every reason to want him to stay. After joining the university’s investment office when he was just 31, Mr. Swensen moved Yale’s portfolio away from a strict menu of stocks and bonds, favoring instead more diverse instruments like hedge funds, commodities like oil and timber, and private company investments.

That strategy revolutionized endowment investing, and other schools have followed suit. Mr. Swensen’s track record and his growing cachet have helped Yale attract donors who believe that their gifts to the university will be well deployed. Although his two books, “Pioneering Portfolio Management” and the more recent “Unconventional Success,” have helped raise his profile as an investment guru, he remains ambivalent about promoting himself. He notes that there are thousands of university professors who have also forgone more lucrative careers to put their skills to work in the academic world.

if I ran the city, the series, #8: plowing priorities

Downtown workers, visitors plow on--If I ran the city, I'd do just what Frank Jackson did the other day: make the main streets passable, and then make the neighborhood streets that feed into them passable. I, too, would serve the businesses, and then the residents.

The PD story's angle is interesting, because its primary perspective comes from a woman in sales for a bank (Why do we need to sell a bank's services? Banks should attract, I would think.) who drives (alone, we presume) in an SUV (conspicuous consumption of resources) all the way in from Strongsville (sprawl near the Medina county line) to find her reserved space in the company lot (the lot of that parasitic banking concern from Scotland, probably on the site of torn-down legacy office space) usurped by others of her ilk, her inconsiderate, disrestpectful fellow employees.

Is the PD holding this woman up to make her the object of sympathy, or ridicule?

Anyway, thanks for the service, Frank, and I just wish more people would get their cars off the street earlier in snowstorms to make the plowing on the neighborhood streets that much more effective.