Sometimes when you have nothing to say, you shouldn’t say it.
The ten most enlightened suburbs – Utne Reader via Planetizen
Great Ta-Nehisi Coates post on homophobia in Hip-hop
Indian views of Slumdog Millionaire – via Freakonomics Blog
Critique of recent “Twin Studies” in Political Science – via Monkey Cage blog
Patrick Ruffini on the Right’s grassroots blogging efforts via TechPresident
Not sure if it has academic value, but it sure makes me laugh!
Actually I don’t know of a public figure that has been as public (if you can call anything Colbert’s character does as “public”) about remixing his creative content. The possibilities of the peer to peer revolution are apparent when we talk about creative/artistic content, but the prospects for political content are harder (not impossible) to find. They do exist (go to the Sunlight Foundation’s page for some good examples). But these projects need mainstream vehicles to promote their existence.
I hope that in the coming months we see some creative (and public) remixing of Obama’s creative commons content. Annotating the material on WhiteHouse.gov and the newly created recovery.gov with annotation tools like Diigo or a mashup of where stimulis money is going using Google Maps might provide some useful results.
BTW….speaking of here is an interesting slideshow tracing the evolution of WhiteHouse.gov. HT: James DeHaan
Forbes has a list of America’s most wired cities.
1. Seattle
2. Atlanta
3. Washington, D.C.
4. Orlando, Fla.
5. Boston, Mass.
6. Miami, Fla.
7. Minneapolis, Minn.
8. Denver, Colo.
9. New York, N.Y.
10. Baltimore, Md.
Since 2007, Forbes has measured cities’ wired quotient by computing the percentage of Internet users with high-speed connections and the number of companies providing high-speed Internet. Since many urban residents access the Internet by wi-fi, we also measure the number of public wireless Internet hot spots in a particular city
This strikes me as a poor way to determine whether a city is truly “wired.” A better measure would come from how cities and their residents use the technology. An emerging area of research focuses on the development of augmented cities.
Here a good description of the augmented city concept:
Augmented Space and Augmented Reality attempt to fill physical space with additional electronic and visual information. In contrast to Virtual Reality, were physical space becomes irrelevant, Augmented Space and Augmented Reality aim to use technologies to melt together digital and physical space. (Manovich 2002)
Has anyone come up with a good index for the level of city augmentation? Probably a bit too theoretical for Forbes. Anyway…here are some good articles on the concept.
Wellman, B. (2001). “Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized Networking”. In International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(2), 227-252. Oxford: Blackwell.
Aurigi, A. (2006). “New Technologies, Same Dilemmas: Policy and Design Issues for the Augmented City”. In Journal of Urban Technology, 13(3), 5-28. London: Routledge.
Mitchell, W. (2007) Intelligent Cities. UOC Papers
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Cool uses of Web 2.0 to augment the inaugural experience courtesy of students in my Internet and Politics course. HT: Ryan Kushigemachi and James DeHaan.
Flickr Photo Download: Before & After: WhiteHouse.gov
Search Inside Obama’s Inaugural Speech
Gene Koo has an interesting observation about Obama’s rhetorical style:
By using complex constructions that resist distillation, Obama minimizes out-of-context critics, although he cannot mute them (witness the “bitter” comment).
Koo suggests his rhetorical style allows him to bypass traditional media that relies on sound bytes to distill arguments and to speak directly to the American people. Personally, I think the bigger constraint for the media is that Obama’s presentation of self defies easy caricature. Pundits haven’t been able to settle on an salient frame from which to attack him….yet. remember, the McCain campaign struck brief gold with “The One” ads that painted him as a celebrity. Were it not for the economic collapse, that meme might have stuck. It is fun to have a major political figure that flummoxes the mainstream media.
If any of you are looking for a good text on race, ethnicity and American politics (of which there are very few), my colleague (and fellow Cuban) Jessica Lavariega Monforti has co-edited a volume that you might want to examine. She’s an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Women’s Studies at the University of Texas – Pan American. The book is called Black and Latino/a Politics: Issues in Political Development in the United States (2006 Barnhardt and Ashe). She describes the rationale for the book below:
As students of urban, racial, and ethnic politics in the United States, we are intimately aware of the fact that very few issues embraced by U.S. officials and institutions over the past quarter century have excluded considerations of race and ethnicity, but this fact is not reflected in the literature of mainstream political science. We wanted to create an edited volume that speaks to this problem by looking at the intersection of race, ethnicity, and political development in the U.S.
In Black and Latino/a Politics, we have included chapters on identity, empowerment, political and social issues, political participation, black-brown coalitions, and public policy. Our hope was to produce a text that was comprehensive in nature, so we also included issues of gender and urban politics as well as analyses of institutions and organizations within these communities of color. There is no more important story to be told than the struggle by Blacks and Latina/os for power in the face of a multitude of constraints that seek to undermine the full flowering of Black and Latina/o strength in the political process.
The processes of governance, the distribution of political power and resources in society, and the emergence and movement of ideas in this country have been profoundly influenced by the existence, beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors of Latinos and Blacks. In other words, Blacks and Latinos have been active participants in the political development of this nation-state and the political institutions therein.
Inherently it seems as though we are headed toward a point in time where critical decisions about the future of Latino and African American political development will be made. New leaders will surface, new relationships will be cultivated, and old relationships may be reinvented to deal with some of the same trials and tribulations that the African American and Latino communities have been confronting for over 400 years. At present, it seems clear that we have a unique opportunity to again change the face of politics in the United States. For better or worse we have been able to determine why — but the questions of who, when, how, and where remain unanswered.
You can experience it at LegoLand:
And my all time favorite Lego model:
Anthony Giddens in his study.
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?
