Friday, February 12, 2010
Maybe I don’t read the right blogs but I’m delighted to see a blog post that actually looks at politics from the perspective of the common space scores. The chart below shows the distribution of the scores for various state legislatures (i’ve no idea what the order means):
This is a very instructive chart. CA, UT, WI, [...]
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Now what do they do? Corporations that is. I mean, given the license corporations have been granted. Will they reward their friends on the Supreme court? Have they jiggered the goals for their strategic planning people? Where is the cookbook of standard recipes; e.g. what you do if your firm owns the big employer [...]
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
We all have various theories for what is drives elections. For example: left v.s. right, race, social issues, economic issues, skilled campaigning, endorsements, slander, self-interest, get-out-the-vote, voter-suppression, candidate height, etc. etc. In thinking about that it is critical to draw a distinction between what garners votes for a candidate, say his height, and how he [...]
Colbert is brilliant:
The Colbert Report
Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word – Honor Bound
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor
Economy
… via Calculated Risk: Colbert: Honor Bound.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Oh man that is ugly, and as the column on the right shows household net worth is even worse.
Monday, November 23, 2009
I was working with someone a while back who was in the midst of advocating for an alternative approach inside his organization. He was frustrated. He was deeply convinced of the benefits of his new approach and frustrated by his colleagues passivity. My first thought was to recall a few of my lists, for example [...]
Sunday, November 15, 2009
This is a post about why gerrymandering might not be as unethical as it appears; or maybe it’s about the hidden agenda of those who argue against it.
Each time you encounter a highly skewed (power-law) distribution the population spread out on the long tail can be assumed to suffer from a severe coordination problem. Being [...]
I have recently started reading Albert Hirschman’s 1991 book “The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy.” I’m only 20 pages into it so no telling where it’s going. But so far, it has totally blown me away. The book is an outline of three styles of rhetoric that are commonly used by [...]
Asked what the earliest known joke is Robert Mankoff, here in this long geeky video on cartoon humor, spins a tail saying: Shortly after the Civil War. He tells a two awful early proto-jokes, one from the Greeks along with another from the century before the Civil War. He’s wrong about this as you can [...]
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
When dealing with communities it’s nice to have some frame works. For example I like both the one from Collaborative Circles and this one. And I often highlight how the common cause that binds a community can be outward facing (defensive) or inward facing (building something). Here is another one: a dozen metrics for [...]