Last week's post on the Globalization of Leadership ended with a clarion-call for change. Given that the entire US economy is built upon a foundation of energy and energy policy, it makes sense to start looking there to see where the biggest economic levers lie.  Here, I offer a somewhat more analytical approach than can be found in the general media.

Did anyone else happen to notice the new buildings going up in Dubai?  I mean besides the giant artificial islands they have been creating in the gulf over the last several years. The nearly completed Burj Dubai is now the world's tallest building, a true marvel of architecture, Art, design, engineering, and initiative.  And oh yes, it is a beacon that screams of the fantastic economic wealth that underpins the great endeavor.

With the end of the primary season coming up this summer, I expect a resurgence of the talk about "red and blue states" that dominated the 2004 election as we approach the direct engagement of the Republican and Democratic parties. This morning, I stumbled on a great site by Michael Gastner, Cosma Shalizi, and Mark Newman from the University of Michigan that uses very nice cartographic representations of the last election results to better visualize the electorate. Popular publications such as USA today published many maps of this sort showing the winner's party by county. But this graphical representation fails to take into account either the population density, electoral votes by county, or how close the vote was. If you process the map topology and scale each county to represent electoral votes, and color the vote results as a continuous scale from red to blue with even results represented as a mixed color of purple, the result is much more interesting. Rather than the stark red/blue divide of the trivial map above, a more representative view of our nation deemphasizes sparsely-populated geographies with little economic impact and highlights those regions driving tomorrow's economy. We also look like a much ...

Just last week, I had a chance to hear a presentation by Alfie Kohn, one of the more (in)famous progressive education proponents, on the perils of emphasizing achievement and performance over engagement in a subject. Besides being an enthusiastic and engaging speaker, Alfie made a number of great points that really resonated with me regarding the damage a national obsession with standardized testing and assessment has wreaked on the quality of education at large. (We coincidentally follow most of Kohn's recommendations in how we operate the WISE labs and programs...) His central point on this topic was that by focusing so much school and parental attention on HOW students are doing instead of on WHAT they are doing and WHY, the very effort assessment has a now reasonably well proven effect of focusing the student's attention on external validation from teachers and grades instead of on the actual subjects under study. The result, according to the many cited research articles, is that students lose intrinsic motivation and interest in the very subjects around which we really hope to instill a lifelong love of learning. It didn't take much effort to extend the notions not only to grades ...

Don't miss reading this link at McSweeny's. Hilarious.

Decisions are made by those who show up. So go and cast your vote without delay. Our country's future depends on you. And as long as you are planning to vote, I'd like to put in a plug for the candidates who support those areas of science, technology, and education that will form the foundation of our future economy. If you are in any doubt as to which candidates are looking towards the future, just visit these links that the American Association for the Advancement of Science has established to review the science and technology policies of each of the leading candidates. Hillary Clinton Barack Obama John McCain Mitt Romney Without making any specific plugs, let's just say that the Republican party has not been kind to science in the last eight years, and it would be good for this country to realize significant revitalization in those areas. Vote for science and our future!

A very topical Op-Ed piece from Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle by Intel Chairman Craig Barrett. I liked it so much I include it in its entirety here.Flagging Economy Needs Science Investments Craig Barrett Sunday, January 20, 2008"Two years ago, the National Academies published the seminal study on U.S. competitiveness entitled "Rising Above the Gathering Storm." The study identified major shortcomings in U.S. investments in basic scientific research as well as in math and science education for our youngsters. The suggestions contained in this study were immediately picked up by the Democratic House Leadership as their competitiveness strategy and later by President Bush in his State of the Union message under his American Competitiveness Initiative. Legislation in the form ...

Who says encryption is only for mathematicians, geeks, or credit card transactions?Generally, I am used to politicians dodging questions they are asked while trying to "stay on message" to push their specific agenda. But there seems to be a new trend in political communication of sending "secret" messages to core constituent groups that are very strategically and specifically encoded or worded so as to not put-off others outside of that core group. Otherwise they might otherwise seek alternative candidates if directly confronted with an open message. And I really do mean code, as in encrypted messages that only those who have, or figure out, the appropriate key can understand. My favorite recent example was pointed out to me by Josh Marshal and his blog readers.One of Mike Huckabee's core campaign messages this season is that he thinks America needs "Vertical Politics" rather than "Horizontal Politics," and a "Vertical Thinker" for its next President. Here are a couple of examples from his speeches and his web site.Being reasonably well-informed politically, this sort of verbiage didn't even register with me as anything unusual or even noteworthy. It didn't appear to me as anything more than a ...

I came across this graphic this morning, which really tells the story of the decline and fall of television news. Check out "30 Minutes with CNN." What is worse, there are other "news" stations that are worse, having mostly replaced factual reporting with talking heads screaming at each other.(click on image for larger version)With all of the news now ad-supported, the key financial goal of the "news stations" has become to keep viewers watching as long as possible so they see as many commercials as possible. Sadly, Americans would rather be entertained than informed, and so departed the news, international first, and then almost everything else.It would seem to me that there MUST be an opportunity for a next-gen CNN with more factual reporting, even if we real news wonks have become a tiny niche...

Sometimes the right picture is worth more than a thousand words. There's a fine art to representing data to clearly illuminate an issue, and this one takes my nomination for the graph of the year. This graphic comparing our government's nutritional recommendations to its actual spending tells the story of money (from lobbyists) over morals. Hat tip to Sean over at Cosmic Variance and Ezra Klein.