An afternoon adventure movie, just for fun. See if you can spot Adrian Brody. (Hint: gesturing towards him with a potato chip in mouth is the height of subtlety.)
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This is a post about Tate Hausman, by Tate Hausman. Why would Tate Hausman write so much about Tate Hausman? Because Google is mal-indexing my site, in response to a horrible spate of comment spam. So I’m trying to get searches back to finding TateHausman.com when someone types in Tate Hausman.
How boring is that? Tate Hausman!
Work Project Week: Newbury, VT
Aug 09, 2007
It started with bat shit.
The rafters were covered with it. Pigeon shit too. The belltower must have housed dozen of the winged beasts, and they found their way down into the roof, the gables and all along the upper windows. Every surface above the second floor sported a guano rug.
I guess that’s what happens in a 200-year-old church.
Every year, my extended Hausman family gathers somewhere in the western hemisphere to throw our backs into a community work project. This year, nine of us spent five days restoring a venerable church-turned-community-center in Newbury, VT. Originally a Methodist seminary with a proud anti-slavery past, the church was converted to a community center a few decades back. The “Vermont Hausmans” – Rick, Emi, Ethan and Nate – have been connected to it since Emi started teaching in the schoolhouse next door. They suggested to the family that we spend our week giving the building some much needed TLC.
Hence, our encounter with shit. We started with a deep cleaning of the upper floors and the belltower. After we could walk around without biohazard suits, we started repairs on the steeple shutters, the access ramp and the sagging porch. The skills we’ve developed from past work projects – in places as diverse as Haiti, Jamaica, California, Florida and New York – served us well.
By the time we had to leave, we’d certainly spruced the place up … but we’d also de-constructed as much as we’d constructed. The shutterless steeple was completely exposed to the elements. The porch roof sat on jacks, above a torn apart section of rot. The porch itself lay sanded but unpainted. I always hate leaving a job half-done, but our extremely competent hosts / project managers, Connie and Claude, assured us they could finish the work we’d started.
The photos tell more than the words; check out my Flickr stream. And if there are any other Hausmans reading this, please add more photos to that stream … and add your own comments about the project below!
The “Long Tail” Catches Up with Me
Apr 28, 2007Yesterday, one of my favorite Web 2.0 jargon-concepts – the long tail – caught up with me, personally.
It started with an email from Mark Little, someone I’ve never met in my life. It said:
From: “Mark Little”
Subject: A History of the Free School Movement?I’m looking for this reference:
Hausman, Tate. (1998) “A History of the Free School Movement”, Brown University.
Are you that Tate Hausman? If so, could you please give me a pointer to how I can get a copy?
I am, in fact, that Tate Hausman. “A History of the Free School Movement” was my senior honors thesis at Brown. As far as I know, its still the definitive history of an educational movement that flourished in the late 60’s, peaked in 1974, and then precipitously dropped out sight.
Free Schooling wasn’t a widely-known movement. At its peak, it might have encompassed 100,000 students. It certainly didn’t attract much academic or journalistic attention, then or now. In my nine years since graduating college, I’ve only had one other inquiry about the paper, and that was from one of the sources I interviewed, wondering whether the paper had ever gotten published.
Before the internet, my paper’s lifespan would have been less than a year old. It would have been written, presented, proudly filed alongside the 30 other Education Department theses of 1998, and promptly forgotten. Maybe, years later, some enterprising student would have stumbled upon it in the stacks. Probably not.
But thanks to the Web, not only did Mark Little find a reference to my paper, he was also able to find me, the original author, and request a copy. The ONLY copy, I should note. Et voila — the long tail in action.
The phrase long tail comes from a description of a typical sales graph:
The X axis represents products. The Y axis represents popularity, or more traditionally, sales. In most markets, a very few products account for a large number of sales (that’s the red part, the “head”). The vast majority of products sell very infrequently (that’s the yellow part, the “long tail,” which snakes off to the right).
In the brick and mortar world, where physical space limits your inventory, this means that the vast majority of items don’t make it to market. So Blockbuster stocks 1,000 copies of Spiderman, but zero copies of Gang Girls 2000.
However, in a gargantuan marketplace with no shelf-space costs – ie, the internet – you can almost always find a buyer for even the most niche products or services. Amazon can “stock” 10 zillion titles, because even selling one copy of The Frog Whisperer a year is profitable, when it doesn’t have to compete for shelf space with The Da Vinci Code.
And thus, Mark Little, who turns out to have attend a Free School from 1968-1970, was able to use the Internet to find the one and only copy of an obscure, 10-year-old research paper that only he and a handful of other Americans would understand, much less seek out and enjoy.
Long live the long tail!
Tate & Shawna’s Treehouse, north-eastern view
South-facing wall swings open above window
Eastern view, before squaring off deck
Just returned from a wedding in Estonia. It’s a country of 1.4 million, very poor, still reeling from decades of Russian occupation.
And yet, they have one of the highest web penetration rates in the world. There are free wifi hotspots all over the capital city, Tallinn, and even in small rural towns we saw the birght orange “wifi eesti” signs.
No wonder it was Estonians who invented Skype. (They’re very proud of it.)
One other cool wireless app they invented, which is now exporting to other countries — paying parking meters by mobile phone. You send an SMS to a central database with your license plate number, you hit “bill me”, and when the meter maid comes around to your car, she uses her special handheld wireless device to activate the bill. Brilliant.