You can experience it at LegoLand:
And my all time favorite Lego model:
Anthony Giddens in his study.
Archive: Jan 2009
This video on the Change.gov website provides an inside look into the Obama campaign’s Technology, Innovation and Government Reform group (TIGR). The purpose of the group is to use information technology to create a more efficient and innovative government. Part of me is skpetical (I see visions of (Al Gore shattering ashtrays on the David Letterman show). But most of me is excited about the prospects. I mean people associated with the federal government using the world mashup and cloud computing?
It will be interesting to see what happens when the geeks are unleashed on Washington culture. James Q. Wilson wrote a pretty good book on why the federal government resists innovation. Basically he breaks it down to an issue of incentives and motivations…i.e. there are no build in incentives to innovate in the Federal government because the profit motive is not the main motivation of government. What will happen when TIGR runs up against the idea that one person’s inefficiency is another persons vital program. It is a truism of American government that once an agency or program is created, it is seldom abolished because interest group that benefits from the agency’s or program’s existence fight to maintain it while everyone else doesn’t have enough skin in the game to care (Ted Lowi called this interest group liberalism).
What makes this incarnation of reform different is the idea of using the crowd as a tool in government reform. I love the idea of citizen briefing books. If the reason “the crowd” doesn’t care about policy issues is because it’s too hard to get information about issues, then this initiative has a serious chance of instigating meaningful reform. If most people don’t care because they just can’t be bothered at all, then lowering transaction costs won’t make a different and this initiative will fail. Looking forward to watching it all go down.
They’re coming back and I can’t do anything about it….except to provide today’s links to the hungry masses:
World Watchdogs: Top 50 Human Rights Blogs from Ethan Zuckerman’s blog
High-school seniors are stressed out – From Slate
Yet another welcome to Web 3.0 – From Forbes
Do you suffer from Status Update Disorder…I think I might…From the Atlantic
A short course on Cuban music via Chris Lydon
and apparently there’s no such thing as six degrees of separatio…from Gene Expression blog.
I’m putting together a public policy course for the first time since graduate school. It reminds me what I love about what I do. Public policy is about how we solve common problems. The palete from which to choose readings is unlimited. That’s been part of my problem…there’s so much interesting material to talk about out there it’s impposible to narrow it down.
One area that sorely lacking in public policy scholarship is the effect of the presentation of information on decision-makers. Im having my students read a few articles about Edward Tufte. Bonanos, C. (2007) The Minister of Information. New York Magazine. and Smith, F. (2007) Intelligent Designs. STANFORD Magazine. Tufte is a self declared arch-enemy of power point and is famous for pointing out NASA’s scientists’ inability to convey important information to higher-ups before the Challenger disaster.
He’s also famous for popularizing this map by Charles Joseph Minard that shows the losses incurred by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. The diagram show how Napoleon’s army thinned (beige band) as temperatures in Russia dropped (black band).
It makes me wonder how different our disciplines would be if most of us put thought into the form of our data presentations. We’re trained to focus solely on function but, mostly because of cost concerns, our conferences provide us little opportunity to use technologies that could bring our data to life. Would having LCD displays at academic conferences make them more policy relevant? Would they encourage more journalists to attend?
Leave me alone! I know I should be working 🙂
(That’s me BTW)
To make your own, go here
HT: King Politics
For those of you who can’t get enough of one political scientist blogger (me), here are two more political science bloggers on which to keep an eye. King Politics is run by Marvin King, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mississippi. The blog provides an interesting and unique take on American Politics. King also has a podcast where he interviews other bloggers and researchers. Worth a listen!
The other worthwhile blog is ImmigrationNow by Gustavo Cano, a Ph.D. political scientist from Columbia who runs the Transnationalism Research Project at the Mexcio-North Research Network and specializes in immigration issues. He has also created a site called Immigration Research Now that serves as a compendium of current research on the subject. Both are worth a look.
Done with Internet and Politics syllabus, on to Public Policy. Speaking of public policy (what you guys call Social Problems), if you guys aren’t aware of TED, it is an amazing teaching resource. I showed this Hans Rosling talk to my Research Methods class (It would work equally well for social inequality or race, class, gender). I don’t think I’ve ever seen students that excited about data! It wasn’t natural 😉
On to le liens épais I think that’s ThickLinks in French.
Women of the Klan – UC Press Blog
From Andrew – The Obama Effect?
and please indulge my soccer geekdom:
Landon Donovan with a nice goal in a friendly for Bayern Munich (around 5 minute mark)
In Between Facts and Norms, Jurgen Habermas considers the ongoing question of how public, democratic deliberation might be moved from peripheral points in society to the very core of governance. That is, how might citizen opinions, social movements, and all manner of individuals and groups working outside the loci of decision-making push their diverse issues to the center of political institutions?
Obama’s change.gov is making headway on this question, and has thus far received high levels of citizen input via their online invitations for issue feedback. As I briefly mentioned in one of our last podcasts, though, it would seem equally productive to move some of the online discussion at change.gov to reflexive matters about the very “procedure” by which this mechanism hopes to best advance their democratic goals. Other bloggers are now picking up on this need too (see www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/33538/, “Open for Questions Round II: A Video Response”).
Many argumentation scholars have different ways of conceptualizing public deliberation. One traditional, useful scheme is to consider arguments as products (i.e. content), as processes (i.e. as human interaction), and as procedures (i.e. as rules or reasons that call into question such matters as forum, structure, etc.). My recommendation for change.gov and any similar online environments the Obama team is about to create is to not only make transparent the issues (argument as products) that might be debated over online, but the most useful processes and procedures that might be put in place to do so. Better yet, the administration should have a period where these considerations are also open to feedback from a public eager for change and full of innovative ideas—as we strive toward a good, albeit imperfect, new media system that decreases the deliberative distance between those with and without access to political resources and power. – Don Waisanen
Bookforum is the greatest aggregator of quality web content I’ve ever come across. The only problem is that it fills me with anxiety to know that there is so much good content out there I’ll never be able to read. This is my filter of their filter of the best of the web today….or those aspects of the web which most closely adhere to what I’m interested in today.
When Groups Don’t Think – Utne Reader
Vote for me Not my Facebook Account – Slate
Three Maps that Get People Worked up – Mental Floss
Winter illness has impeded my blog posting for the past few days….
For anyone who’s interested in what I actually do for a paycheck, here’s my Internet and Politics syllabus for the fall (feel free to pick apart). As befits a political scientist who blogs for a Sociology journal, the syllabus has a decidedly interdiscipinary bent. If anyone has some reading suggestions…serve ’em up.
My hope is to incorporate the blog into the course discussion and vice versa. I welcome the community to take part in our ongoing conversations. I’ve used blogs in the classroom the past two semesters and I’ve found that the students learn a great deal from comments posted by faculty or students from other institutions. It’s a great way to extend the conversation beyond the walls of the classroom.
This video on the Change.gov website provides an inside look into the Obama campaign’s Technology, Innovation and Government Reform group (TIGR). The purpose of the group is to use information technology to create a more efficient and innovative government. Part of me is skpetical (I see visions of (Al Gore shattering ashtrays on the David Letterman show). But most of me is excited about the prospects. I mean people associated with the federal government using the world mashup and cloud computing?
It will be interesting to see what happens when the geeks are unleashed on Washington culture. James Q. Wilson wrote a pretty good book on why the federal government resists innovation. Basically he breaks it down to an issue of incentives and motivations…i.e. there are no build in incentives to innovate in the Federal government because the profit motive is not the main motivation of government. What will happen when TIGR runs up against the idea that one person’s inefficiency is another persons vital program. It is a truism of American government that once an agency or program is created, it is seldom abolished because interest group that benefits from the agency’s or program’s existence fight to maintain it while everyone else doesn’t have enough skin in the game to care (Ted Lowi called this interest group liberalism).
What makes this incarnation of reform different is the idea of using the crowd as a tool in government reform. I love the idea of citizen briefing books. If the reason “the crowd” doesn’t care about policy issues is because it’s too hard to get information about issues, then this initiative has a serious chance of instigating meaningful reform. If most people don’t care because they just can’t be bothered at all, then lowering transaction costs won’t make a different and this initiative will fail. Looking forward to watching it all go down.
They’re coming back and I can’t do anything about it….except to provide today’s links to the hungry masses:
World Watchdogs: Top 50 Human Rights Blogs from Ethan Zuckerman’s blog
High-school seniors are stressed out – From Slate
Yet another welcome to Web 3.0 – From Forbes
Do you suffer from Status Update Disorder…I think I might…From the Atlantic
A short course on Cuban music via Chris Lydon
and apparently there’s no such thing as six degrees of separatio…from Gene Expression blog.
I’m putting together a public policy course for the first time since graduate school. It reminds me what I love about what I do. Public policy is about how we solve common problems. The palete from which to choose readings is unlimited. That’s been part of my problem…there’s so much interesting material to talk about out there it’s impposible to narrow it down.
One area that sorely lacking in public policy scholarship is the effect of the presentation of information on decision-makers. Im having my students read a few articles about Edward Tufte. Bonanos, C. (2007) The Minister of Information. New York Magazine. and Smith, F. (2007) Intelligent Designs. STANFORD Magazine. Tufte is a self declared arch-enemy of power point and is famous for pointing out NASA’s scientists’ inability to convey important information to higher-ups before the Challenger disaster.
He’s also famous for popularizing this map by Charles Joseph Minard that shows the losses incurred by Napoleon’s army in the Russian campaign of 1812. The diagram show how Napoleon’s army thinned (beige band) as temperatures in Russia dropped (black band).
It makes me wonder how different our disciplines would be if most of us put thought into the form of our data presentations. We’re trained to focus solely on function but, mostly because of cost concerns, our conferences provide us little opportunity to use technologies that could bring our data to life. Would having LCD displays at academic conferences make them more policy relevant? Would they encourage more journalists to attend?
Leave me alone! I know I should be working 🙂
(That’s me BTW)
To make your own, go here
HT: King Politics
For those of you who can’t get enough of one political scientist blogger (me), here are two more political science bloggers on which to keep an eye. King Politics is run by Marvin King, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Mississippi. The blog provides an interesting and unique take on American Politics. King also has a podcast where he interviews other bloggers and researchers. Worth a listen!
The other worthwhile blog is ImmigrationNow by Gustavo Cano, a Ph.D. political scientist from Columbia who runs the Transnationalism Research Project at the Mexcio-North Research Network and specializes in immigration issues. He has also created a site called Immigration Research Now that serves as a compendium of current research on the subject. Both are worth a look.
Done with Internet and Politics syllabus, on to Public Policy. Speaking of public policy (what you guys call Social Problems), if you guys aren’t aware of TED, it is an amazing teaching resource. I showed this Hans Rosling talk to my Research Methods class (It would work equally well for social inequality or race, class, gender). I don’t think I’ve ever seen students that excited about data! It wasn’t natural 😉
On to le liens épais I think that’s ThickLinks in French.
Women of the Klan – UC Press Blog
From Andrew – The Obama Effect?
and please indulge my soccer geekdom:
Landon Donovan with a nice goal in a friendly for Bayern Munich (around 5 minute mark)
In Between Facts and Norms, Jurgen Habermas considers the ongoing question of how public, democratic deliberation might be moved from peripheral points in society to the very core of governance. That is, how might citizen opinions, social movements, and all manner of individuals and groups working outside the loci of decision-making push their diverse issues to the center of political institutions?
Obama’s change.gov is making headway on this question, and has thus far received high levels of citizen input via their online invitations for issue feedback. As I briefly mentioned in one of our last podcasts, though, it would seem equally productive to move some of the online discussion at change.gov to reflexive matters about the very “procedure” by which this mechanism hopes to best advance their democratic goals. Other bloggers are now picking up on this need too (see www.techpresident.com/blog/entry/33538/, “Open for Questions Round II: A Video Response”).
Many argumentation scholars have different ways of conceptualizing public deliberation. One traditional, useful scheme is to consider arguments as products (i.e. content), as processes (i.e. as human interaction), and as procedures (i.e. as rules or reasons that call into question such matters as forum, structure, etc.). My recommendation for change.gov and any similar online environments the Obama team is about to create is to not only make transparent the issues (argument as products) that might be debated over online, but the most useful processes and procedures that might be put in place to do so. Better yet, the administration should have a period where these considerations are also open to feedback from a public eager for change and full of innovative ideas—as we strive toward a good, albeit imperfect, new media system that decreases the deliberative distance between those with and without access to political resources and power. – Don Waisanen
Bookforum is the greatest aggregator of quality web content I’ve ever come across. The only problem is that it fills me with anxiety to know that there is so much good content out there I’ll never be able to read. This is my filter of their filter of the best of the web today….or those aspects of the web which most closely adhere to what I’m interested in today.
When Groups Don’t Think – Utne Reader
Vote for me Not my Facebook Account – Slate
Three Maps that Get People Worked up – Mental Floss
Winter illness has impeded my blog posting for the past few days….
For anyone who’s interested in what I actually do for a paycheck, here’s my Internet and Politics syllabus for the fall (feel free to pick apart). As befits a political scientist who blogs for a Sociology journal, the syllabus has a decidedly interdiscipinary bent. If anyone has some reading suggestions…serve ’em up.
My hope is to incorporate the blog into the course discussion and vice versa. I welcome the community to take part in our ongoing conversations. I’ve used blogs in the classroom the past two semesters and I’ve found that the students learn a great deal from comments posted by faculty or students from other institutions. It’s a great way to extend the conversation beyond the walls of the classroom.