Get your data visualization skills ready:

The initial version of the Campaign Finance API offers overall figures for presidential candidates, as well as state-by-state and ZIP code totals for specific candidates. In addition, the API supports a contributor name search using any of the following parameters: first name, last name and ZIP code.

The GEMS system is supposed to save information from one card at a time to be counted in order as the cards are read by a database that Riggall described as the “mother ship.” But a logic error in the program can cause incoming votes to essentially shove aside other votes that are waiting in the electronic line before they are counted. The mistake occurs in milliseconds, Premier’s customer notice says.

The thought that in a democratic society we would have a private, closed electronic voting system is absolutely stunning.

What in the world is Carleton doing on this list of predominantly tech and engineering schools?

Robert Zubrin:

So if we put aside the spectacularly improbable prospect of fueling our planet with extraterrestrial hydrogen imports, the only way to get free hydrogen on Earth is to make it. The trouble is that making hydrogen requires more energy than the hydrogen so produced can provide. Hydrogen, therefore, is not a source of energy. It simply is a carrier of energy. And it is, as we shall see, an extremely poor one.

 
I can’t vouch for the numbers he’s using, but this is a pretty compelling argument against continuing to dump billions into hydrogen fuel research. I’m always excited for new, alternative energy sources, but perhaps wind and solar research could use that money more effectively.

An interesting look at the world’s access to something we take pretty much for granted: drinking water. (In French, but I think you’ll get the idea.)

The team, led by MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences Edward Gibson, found that members of the Piraha tribe in remote northwestern Brazil use language to express relative quantities such as “some” and “more,” but not precise numbers.

 
It seems like the Pirahã have turned a lot of our comprehension of language and cognition on its head. This brings to mind an article in The New Yorker from last year that discusses some of the issues at play.

It’s an old article, but republished in The Onion’s Obligatory Green Issue: Report: 98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others

“Expanding mass transit isn’t just a good idea, it’s a necessity,” Holland said. “My drive to work is unbelievable. I spend more than two hours stuck in 12 lanes of traffic. It’s about time somebody did something to get some of these other cars off the road.”

 
Classic.

[Kids] seemed to instinctually understand what “Wall•E” was saying; they didn’t pepper their chaperones with questions along the way. At the end they clapped their small hands. What they applauded was not some banal cartoonish triumph of good over evil but a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out. […] Americans should see [WALL•E] to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America’s patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president.

 
I can’t begin to describe how much I enjoyed that film.

An interesting concept for avoiding telephone menus and connecting you directly to real humans. I wonder how / if they’re able to get around the classically obnoxious automated request to enter your account number, followed by, “Hi, my name is Jon Smith. May I have your account number please?”

“Amtrak received just $1.3 billion in funds last year […] $14.5 billion to Air Transportation last year, $35 billion to highways.”

“There is no place in the world that has decent rail service where it’s not subsidized by the government.”

 
Probably the first pro-train mainstream newscast I’ve seen in this country since, well, ever. I’m impressed they compared the transit subsidies of other transportation (air and road). Trains aren’t profitable, but neither are roads or planes. (Be sure to check out that awesome train shoot under the bridge in France at 1:54)

“[The perceived solution of a ‘hybrid’] is based more on customer perception triggered by very clever marketing and communication campaigns than on pure rationale scientific arguments” […] Most manufacturers are rapidly integrating hybrid electric vehicles into their technology portfolio, even despite the absence of significant profitability or meaningful emissions reduction.

 
Remember kids: spend more time walking or biking to go places and less time driving to go walk on a treadmill or ride an exercise bike. Always more effective than a corporate marketing campaign.

The project, temporarily called Lyon-Dubai City, will include a university; small versions of Lyon’s main museums; housing, hotel and office space; cafes, restaurants, pedestrian malls, town squares, courtyards, a film center, maybe even a church, all inspired by Lyon, France’s third-largest city.

 
The part that really piques my skeptical curiosity is the theory that “this will not be Disneyland or Las Vegas […] What the project must not do, its participants insist, is clone Lyon.”

Sure to generate a lot of discussion, Pinker has a fascinating look on morality in this weekend’s NY Times Magazine:

[A] thought experiment devised by the philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson called the Trolley Problem[:] On your morning walk, you see a trolley car hurtling down the track, the conductor slumped over the controls. In the path of the trolley are five men working on the track, oblivious to the danger. You are standing at a fork in the track and can pull a lever that will divert the trolley onto a spur, saving the five men. Unfortunately, the trolley would then run over a single worker who is laboring on the spur. Is it permissible to throw the switch, killing one man to save five? Almost everyone says “yes.”

Consider now a different scene. You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent.

 
It just seems implausible that I could lift this large man up over the railing high enough to throw him over, despite his obvious struggling, and have his fall manage to perfectly land him in front of the trolley, to say nothing of the difficulty a large man on the tracks might have in successfully stopping the trolley from–oh, what’s that? Right. Not the point of the exercise.
 
It’s a fun and thought-provoking read [sic].

The new logo consists of a bright red lowercase “xerox” that sits alongside a red sphere sketched with lines that link to form a stylized X. According to Anne M. Mulcahy, Xerox’s chief, that little piece of art represents the connection to customers, partners, industry and innovation. Ms. Mulcahy insists that the Xerox brand already stands for all those things already, of course.

 
Ugh. I’m starting to think there must be only one corporate designer in this country…

Okay, we’ve all heard enough about the tiger attack on Christmas, but the first paragraph of this article was just too tasty a morsel to pass up:

A koala is kidnapped. Sheep are molested by a human intruder. An elephant does a headstand on a technician, breaking her pelvis. A tiger ravages its keeper’s arm. A year later, on Christmas Day, the same feline escapes, kills and gets killed.

 
Gotta love the zoo. (Thanks to JIM.)

This product has no included manual and no customer support! You are on your own. I have used [a bic pen] in the past, so I was able to figure it out, but it took a while. Another caveat: If you lose the cap, there is no way to attach it to anything because the retainer clip is inexplicably attached to the cap. Also, the caps for the different colors of ink all fit each other, so it is far too easy to misplace a cap on the wrong pen. Very confusing.

 
Interesting, indeed.

Holy crap. I wrote about this as a joke, making fun of bottled water.

Excuse me while I breathe in deeply and let out a cry.(Thanks to Teague.)

Rappers in Marseille, some of the most original and distinctive ones anyway, compose sad odes to their local neighborhoods and hymns to the whole melting pot city. The sound of Paris hip-hop, slicker and more aggressive, adopts much from American gangsta rap, as Marseille hip-hop does, too, but Marseille boasts a groovier style. It mixes in blues, flamenco, Jamaican ragga.

 
Marseille, a city often termed ‘violent’ in France, not only avoids the mass violence sparked by the police car deaths in Villiers-le-Bel, but yields hip-hop lyrics like this:

“I know all the cops are not that bad, but why do you always ask me for my ID? To your violence I prefer responding with my lyrics. Can’t we have a proper dialogue?”

To get along with machines, Dr. Norman suggests we build them using a lesson from Delft, a town in the Netherlands where cyclists whiz through crowds of pedestrians in the town square. If the pedestrians try to avoid an oncoming cyclist, they’re liable to surprise him and collide, but the cyclist can steer around them just fine if they ignore him and keep walking along at the same pace. “Behaving predictably, that’s the key.”

 
Something interaction designers struggle with constantly: when does being smart simplify a user’s life, and when does it make it more complex? I can think of countless examples of when being “too smart” inherently ignores human inconsistencies and variables, while occasionally it just feels right.

This op-ed piece in the NY Times on the second amendment, being interesting from a comma-usage perspective, a new way to parse the second amendment, might be worth some thought.

San Francisco public transit users will ride for free beginning December 12 on a view friendly double decker coach offering 83 seats compared to 52 seats available on standard articulated buses. [Passengers] ride free in returning for completing a survey on their experience with riding on high.

 
This is pretty funny-looking if you ask me, but might be cool. Looks like it should have a third door in the back.

Not the American definition of French Kissing, mind you.

Up to 93mpg, bio-diesel ready, 6-speed manual, 90g/km CO2 emissions, all-electric inner-city mode toggle, 340 Nm torque at 2,000 rpm, all glass roof…
 
Count me reasonably impressed. Now to figure out how to get one into the U.S…

I love watching how different people react to this impromptu concert. It reminds me how I miss the music in the Paris métro.

Something didn’t seem right. The reporters were lobbing too many softballs. No one asked about trailers with formaldehyde for those made homeless by the fires. And the media seemed to be giving Johnson all day to wax on and on about FEMA’s greatness. Of course, that could be because the questions were asked by FEMA staffers playing reporters.

 
Incredible. It’s not that this incident alone is ridiculous, although it is, but the fact that FEMA could even think of pulling such a stunt scares me. To top it off, here was the White House response [reg req’d]:

White House press secretary Dana Perino said yesterday that “it is not a practice that we would employ here at the White House. We certainly don’t condone it. We didn’t know about it beforehand. . . . They, I’m sure, will not do it again.”

 
Oh, cool, now I feel better.

(Be sure to check out MSNBC’s video.)

The SFGate ran an article entitled, “Storm Pounds the Bay Area“:

The cold front is blowing out of town, but forecasters expect more systems to bring “steady light rain” to the region Friday and again Monday morning.

 
Maybe I’m sensitive because I’ve been in “real” storms before, but even Webster’s seems to agree:

A disturbance of the normal condition of the atmosphere, manifesting itself by winds of unusual force or direction, accompanied by rain, snow, hail, thunder, and lightning, or flying sand or dust.

 
We had one of those: rain. And it was light. Wake me up after the we have a few hundred lightning strikes and a couple tornados.

[W]e are concerned about the inevitable biases in any single ranking formula, about the admissions frenzy, and the way in which rankings can contribute to that frenzy and to a false sense that educational success or fit can be ranked in a single numerical list. Since college and ranking agencies should maintain a degree of distance to ensure objectivity, from now on data we make available to college guides will be made public via our Web sites rather than be distributed exclusively to a single entity.

 
It makes me happy to see virtually all of the liberal arts colleges “on top” of the US News & World Reports Top Schools list (ahem, Davidson?) have signed on in agreement to this. My Carleton education would have been just as good if the school were “ranked” at the bottom based on the magazine’s formula.

Unfortunately, Minneapolis and Portland make the list.

Michael Poremba, a cycling enthusiast who lives in San Francisco and works in Redwood City, was in Paris in August and said he was amazed at what he saw. “Everywhere you looked, people were riding the bikes, tons of people,” he said.

“People will think twice about the need to get in their car and go five or 10 blocks,” Mayor Newsom said.

 
Back when I first wrote about this and explored a bit in Europe with Teague this spring, I wrote a few letters to the city of SF about this. I’m ecstatic to see the idea is being taken seriously.

I don’t want to comment too much on Sarkozy’s politics, but the New York Times is giving some pretty interesting insight here into the French president and his ideas on the future of Europe.

Visibly restless, at times brusque, he greeted his guests with stiff handshakes and unadorned “Bonjours.” Perpetually in motion, he rocked uncomfortably in a green brocade armchair and gripped the backs of the gilt chairs on either side of him. His jaw muscles twitched. His gait was awkward. He cut off his interviewers in mid-sentence. He stumbled twice on the word “multilateralism,” laughing at himself the second time and turning to his national security adviser, Jean-David Levitte, to finish the word for him.

 
This should be an interesting presidency beginning to unfold.

See also the NYTimes’ Excerpts From Interview With Nicolas Sarkozy.

Republican Mitt Romney, in New York City for a fundraising stop, criticized Clinton’s proposal, saying, ‘'’Hillary care’ continues to be bad medicine … in her plan, we have Washington-managed health care. Fundamentally, she takes her inspiration from European bureaucracies.'’

 
For better or worse, it looks like Hillary’s take on universal health care promises to be debated thoroughly for a while.

The initiative, known as Healthy San Francisco, is the first effort by a locality to guarantee care to all of its uninsured, and it represents the latest attempt by state and local governments to patch a inadequate federal system.

It is financed mostly by the city, which is gambling that it can provide universal and sensibly managed care to the uninsured for about the amount being spent on their treatment now, often in emergency rooms.

 
While San Francisco certainly has some bizarre politics (e.g., Mayor Newsom getting rid of his entire staff), but this is one of those positive things that comes out of the city. I hope it works, and I hope it serves as a model.
 
May our federal government figure this one out some day.