Tornado 87
The Rural Alberta Advantage performing in a record store for the Paper Bag Sessions.
tofias dot net
log | a bucket full of thoughts
1.5 Tons of Signatures Filed for Walker's Recall
1 million signatures. Looks like we’re going to do some more voting…
“It is beyond legal challenge,” said Ryan Lawler, vice chairman of United Wisconsin.
Living in Wisconsin has been great for my election day photography (via Wisconsin Forward).
I Have a Dream*
*Subject to licensing fees and requirements from the Sony Corporation.
“ Why would you want to nominate the guy who lost to the guy who lost to Obama?”
— Newt Gingrich on time consistent preferences
Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email?
Yes.
From a study of email refinding by Steve Whittaker, Tara Matthews, Julian Cerruti, Hernan Badenes, John Tang at IBM Research. From the abstract:
We carried out a field study of 345 long-term users who conducted over 85,000 refinding actions. Our data support opportunistic access. People who create complex folders indeed rely on these for retrieval, but these preparatory behaviors are inefficient and do not improve retrieval success.
I think the key advantage that email has over other types of personal files is that it comes to us with so much metadata baked in to each message (via MR).
CEO of USA in NYT
Published in the New York Times on January 12th of this very 2012.
If you look back over history, you see that while business success can sensitize a politician to the realities other executives face, there’s little correlation between business success and political success…. In sum, great presidents are often aristocrats and experienced political insiders.
and
[T]here’s a deeper problem in the whole notion that what this nation needs is a successful businessman as president: America is not, in fact, a corporation. Making good economic policy isn’t at all like maximizing corporate profits. And businessmen — even great businessmen — do not, in general, have any special insights into what it takes to achieve economic recovery.
So if you squint really hard Brooks and Krugman are in agreement. Today at least.
Who's the Job Creator?
See also Nicholas Kristof on “The Value of Teachers” (both via Wisconsin Forward):
What shone through the [Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff] study was the variation among teachers. Great teachers not only raised test scores significantly — an effect that mostly faded within a few years — but also left their students with better life outcomes. A great teacher (defined as one better than 84 percent of peers) for a single year between fourth and eighth grades resulted in students earning almost 1 percent more at age 28.
“ To understand Newt Gingrich, you have to envision a mixture of ‘Kill Bill’ and ‘Carrie,’ after Sissy Spacek gets hit with the bucket of blood. His only mission in life is getting even with Mitt Romney and the rich minions who paid for all those anti-Newt ads in Iowa. He is exactly like Sweeney Todd mixed with Charles Bronson in ‘Death Wish.’ And maybe a smidge of ‘Shogun Assassin.’”
— Gail Collins (N.B. I have no idea what this means, but it’s funny)
“ The annual orgy of BCS championship football — of all big-time college sports — makes a mockery of the whole notion of amateurism, the purpose of universities and the idea that work should be rewarded with fair compensation.”
— Greg Knauss
Boys of Summer
The Papercuts cover Don Henley.
