tofias dot net

Penguin’s CEO John Makinson on his company’s strategies for the iPad (via mrgan). It seems clear that those who take an aggressive approach, experiment, and try many things at once are going to be more likely to find success. And I see demos like this and I just get excited for the thing all over again.

It’s a search problem:

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi searches for votes and the WH hunts for compromises on health care reform, party strategists on both sides remain convinced that a legislative overhaul will pass.

If you ever had a dream about what an afternoon (or at least reading about an afternoon) with SM would be like, you can rest assured that Klosterman delivers here. An article as perfect as anything on Terror Twilight.

I’ve seen Malkmus perform three times, but I’ve got near-Phish level enthusiasm to see Pavement this summer. Tickets arrived yesterday.

There are a lot interesting bits in this New Yorker profile of Paul Krugman. But the part I found most appealing was the idea that economic formalization created holes – and opportunities – in our understanding of the world. The process of modeling is compared to mapmaking:

Sixteenth-century maps of Africa were misleading in all kinds of ways, but they contained quite a bit of information about the continent’s interior—the River Niger, Timbuktu. Two centuries later, mapmaking had become much more accurate, but the interior of Africa had become a blank. As standards for what counted as a mappable fact rose, knowledge that didn’t meet those standards—secondhand travellers’ reports, guesses hazarded without compasses or sextants—was discarded and lost. Eventually, the higher standards paid off—by the nineteenth century the maps were filled in again—but for a while the sharpening of technique caused loss as well as gain.

I’m very fond of the map analogy when teaching modeling to students; even 40 (or more) years into the formalization of political science, I wonder what old truths and ideas we have discarded, what opportunities exist. Some inspiration for reading old work to refine the new maps.

How can a sound (or a movement?) be dead that was undefineable in the first place?

My sense is that it matters where you come from at least as much as where you are now. Also we need labels to talk about stuff, a small amount of noise is okay.

Posted with Instapaper (via Marco, I think).

Ezra Klein asks if healthcare reform is popular – and it is if you ask people about their support for many of the components of the reform, but not so much if you ask people to stick their thumb up or down to the whole thing.

I think it’s easy to chalk up these sorts of survey results to the common variability and stupid human tricks we often see with polling. However, I think a good portion of the blame has to go to Obama and the Democrats for failing to market this bill with morality and as a series of regulatory changes (see Canes-Wrone and de Marchi 2002) and allowing the GOP to frame the discussion as a question over the size of government. It’s much too easy to maintain a status quo policy by maligning leviathan and the Democrats let their opponents do just that.

Link via Seth Masket who is quickly becoming one of my favorite bloggers.

More and better said on Ezra K. from frequent co-author and good friend of the log, Michael Ensley:

A big bill leaves too much room for doubt, attack. They took the wrong lesson away from 1993-94. The problem for Clinton was not getting Congress involved early. The problem was setting a modest, focused, and clear bill. We are going to make it better by doing X. Instead they were all over the map. By trying to do a comprehensive overhaul you open up to many avenues. Maybe he had to keep to campaign promises. But why not start by delivering something simple. A health insurance reform bill based on mandates and eliminating discrimination based on pre-existing health conditions.

I’ve frequently espoused the Congress-wasn’t-involved-early-enough story while explaining 1994. But I think Ensley is right, the tack taken in both instances was too sprawling to appeal to an inattentive electorate.

Last week, Seth Masket posted about the disincentives toward winning majority power that some political actors might face. I thought it was a cute argument, but mostly bunk. However, some figures from Vanity Fair make me reconsider (via Political Wire). In the past year, liberal magazines are doing poorly but sales and subscriptions to conservative magazines are up – even in the down economy.

If (relative) political extremists are willing to purchase media as a way to compensate for their favored party’s minority status, doesn’t that potentially speak to the Tea Party movement? In this light, the Tea Party movement is just a group of vendors selling t-shirts and conventions, profiting off of angst like the magazine publishers. Maybe they’re just monetizing the hate. Real parties need elites, maybe the Tea Partiers are just angry consumers with political roots who need more than magazines.