13 April 2012
design & politics — #
- Start with needs
- Do less
- Design with data
- Do the hard work to make it simple
- Iterate. Then iterate again.
- Build for inclusion
- Understand context
- Build digital services, not websites
- Be consistent, not uniform
- Make things open: it makes things better
5 April 2012
science & politics — #
A Message From a Republican Meteorologist on Climate Change
I’m going to tell you something that my Republican friends are loath to admit out loud: climate change is real. I’m a moderate Republican, fiscally conservative; a fan of small government, accountability, self-empowerment and sound science. I am not a climate scientist. I’m a Penn State meteorologist, and the weather maps I’m staring at are making me very uncomfortable. No, you’re not imagining it: we’ve clicked into a new and almost foreign weather pattern.
3 March 2012
food & politics — #
Is the food revolution just a great big fat lie?
From the multimillionaire chefs who claim to be just like the rest of us to the multinationals making public health policy, there’s something a bit iffy about the new food culture
22 February 2012
politics & design — #
Fox Still Struggling With Basic Chart Concepts: Gas Price Edition
10 February 2012
media & politics — #
Anil Dash: The Right Wing’s $7 Billion Media Subsidy
Considering how much conservatives and right-wing political personalities in the United States claim to hate the liberal media, it’s remarkable how much money they’ve been able to funnel into the coffers of the liberal media institutions they malign.
25 January 2012
politics & culture — #
How long would it take Mitt Romney to make what you make in a year?
21 January 2012
politics & culture — #
Larry Lessig Interviews Jack Abramoff
There’s a long discussion about the power of staffers on the Hill, rather than the actual elected officials (who “never read the actual bills”). They note that staffers are the real power. Abramoff talks about how he never wanted to hire the actual Congressional Reps, but always focused on hiring staffers. And then he makes a key admission that won’t surprise many people. He says that, early on, he focused on hiring people when he had job openings. But, later, he would talk to staffers — especially chiefs of staff — and just let them know he had a job opening for them whenever they wanted it. And he would ask them: “When do you want to start?” If they said “two years,” he knew that the guy was already working for him, but on the inside. As he says “I really hired him that day,” even though he went on for two more years working as a chief-of-staff to someone in Congress.
4 January 2012
politics & culture — #
Paul Krugman: Nobody Understands Debt
In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.
This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.
23 December 2011
politics & travel — #
Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer?
Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security.
To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.