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.

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've been meaning to post an update on climate change for some time now, as I have refrained from opining since I saw Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" several months ago. At that time, I posted a story, "A Convenient Supposition" which called out that from the data available and collated at the time (and presented in the film) there was still a big difference between correlation and causality. Moreover, there was a long way between correlations in CO2 levels and global temperature fluctuations and the claim that one CAUSED the other. In fact, there was some considerable evidence that over the past few million years that it was the temperature changes that preceded the CO2 concentration changes, offering a strong indication that the chain of causation was reversed from what alarmists might otherwise prefer in their supporting data.But since that time, additional evidence has been collected by Hansen and others that, to my mind, irrefutably demonstrates and validates the hypothesis that the industrial development and emission of greenhouse gases has contributed substantially to global temperature increases.For a more detailed look at the most recent data compilations and analysis, check out the original scientific draft report ...

I've heard and read many business aphorisms in my tenure running first MicroDisplay and now MobiTV. The single most important and accurate saying of the vast lot, the one principle which has the broadest and most significant impact on the success of any venture I could imagine, is: "Hire slowly and fire fast." But this principle is now far out of reach for many public schools.The "hire slowly" part is simply about exercising extreme care in who you hire, their qualifications, their work ethic, their standards of excellence, their record of past performance, and perhaps most importantly, their cultural fit and ability to maintain and foster the above attributes with a positive spirit even when severely overworked. I have found that A people really hire A People, and B People really do hire C People. Too much of that, and before you know it, despite a core group of well-intentioned and capable staff, the intrepid find themselves rapidly surrounded by a growing sea of mediocrity, or worse. This is a particularly pernicious problem when an enterprise is forced to grow quickly in an area with a limited pool of quality candidates.With by-and-large miserable compensation packages, often ...

I couldn't escape the grand political irony exposed in this recent story entitled "New Crops Needed to Avoid Famines" from the BBC on climate change. The basic thesis is that the expected increases in global temperature will shift the regions amenable to fertile crop production northward. Worse yet, in the absence of any replacement crops, or the adoption of massive farming infrastructure in the newly fertile regions, broad famines will ensue. The shift has reportedly already begun with rice yields in Asia declining 10% per degree of average annual temperature increase.Then it struck me. The cornerstone of political support for the Republican party lies in America's breadbasket, the Red States. The following map from the BBC article says it all. One would think think that such a clear and present threat to their core constituency would get a little more attention. But sadly, the Republican platform is currently opposed to both efforts at mitigating global warming AND genetic engineering which could develop more climate-proof crops. It is almost as if they are trying to guarantee the economic ruin of their constituency (and the rest of the US with them) within a couple of generations. ...

I found an interesting chart on the Foreign Policy web site this morning that highlights some of the conflicted logic surrounding US energy and tax policies.The gasoline tax rate within the US is literally less than one-tenth the comparable tax in Europe while per-capita gas consumption is more than four times higher. The anti-correlation is very illuminating. And while there are clearly many factors driving gasoline consumption relative to Europe such as the very area over which Americans much drive being larger than the average European roaming distance, even a quick glance at the chart shows that if the US is really serious about immediately decreasing the dependency on foreign, there is a very simple policy decision that could have broad and immediate impact, and is probably worth an experiment. The US administration could substantially raise the gasoline tax to a meaningful level, and see what happens.There is a reasonable likelihood that doubling the effective price of gas could dramatically reduce consumption just through price elasticity alone. For those of you not familiar with retail sales economics, price elasticity is the relationship between the price of goods and the volume of sales at that price. ...