Kal @ Kickstarter

Kickstarter, is an amazingly cool website* that helps to crowd-fund interesting start-up projects. If you have never heard of it go and visit straight away, go on, and check out the exciting whirl of invention unleashed on the website.

More importantly, go and take a look at a project just launched by our cartoonist Kal. He wants to publish an awesome new book, a major retrospective of his work. Ii predict that this Kickstarter project is going to sell out fast so if you'd like to be the first to receive Kal's new book (signed), have your name in the book, be invited to the book launch, and even receive a signed cartoon, visit Kal's Kickstarter page here. 

* Updated 16th Jan 2013: corrected statement that Kickstarter a non-profit. It isn't. But still amazingly cool.

A year in the Midwest

Picture by Dori

I've been in the Midwest just over a year and it is starting to feel a lot like home. It is a difficult place to describe to outsiders, not least because the Midwest really doesn't exist as any kind of real place. It is more of a story that people like to tell about this part of the world.

I wish it were not so, after all I am the Midwest Correspondent. But increasingly I wonder whether I might as well be the Santa Claus correspondent because the place that is the Midwest does not actually exist--although it probably ought to.

The reality is that the Midwest is a loose collection of states, some of which are very different, which are all trying to compete with each other and steal each others jobs and businesses. It is a shame that they can't work together to get ahead in a world that is changing very quickly. I hope to write about this more in the new year.

Here is a round-up of my activity over the last few months. Most recently I was in Lansing, Michigan recently, for the protests against the new right-to-work laws. About 10,000 union workers and their families and supporters turned up to protest (in vain) against the new laws. I also appeared at the World In..2013 festival. I chaired a few sessions, the briefest of which was particularly memorable with Will Tracy of The Onion. His predictions for 2013 can be seen here.

Your Christmas reading list might include these recent pieces:

Not what it used to be (American higher education) - American universities represent declining value for money to their students. Dec 1st 2012 | CHICAGO | from the print edition

ON THE face of it, American higher education is still in rude health. In worldwide rankings more than half of the top 100 universities, and eight of the top ten, are American. The scientific output of American institutions is unparalleled. They produce most of the world’s Nobel laureates and scientific papers. Moreover college graduates, on average, still earn far more and receive better benefits than those who do not have a degree. [More...]

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Homeschooling - Who needs teachers? Dec 22nd 2012 | CHICAGO | from the print edition

"Every morning five-year-old Tristan starts his school day by reading in bed with his mother. He especially likes Enid Blyton. And even though he often doesn’t bother to get out of his pyjamas in time for his first class of the day, at the age of five he has a reading age of between seven and eight." [More...]

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MOOCs (contributing author) - Online courses are transforming higher education, creating new opportunities for the best and huge problems for the rest Dec 22nd 2012 | CHICAGO, LONDON AND NEW YORK | from the print edition

TOP-QUALITY teaching, stringent admissions criteria and impressive qualifications allow the world’s best universities to charge mega-fees: over $50,000 for a year of undergraduate study at Harvard. Less exalted providers have boomed too, with a similar model that sells seminars, lectures, exams and a “salad days” social life in a single bundle. Now online provision is transforming higher education, giving the best universities a chance to widen their catch, opening new opportunities for the agile, and threatening doom for the laggard and mediocre. [More...]

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Michigan’s right-to-work laws
Anti-union legislation in the home of the car industry, Dec 15th 2012 | LANSING | from the print edition NO SELF-RESPECTING Midwestern capitol has been untouched of late by an angry crew of drum-banging, sign-waving union workers shouting at lawmakers. The cause of all this aggravation is a wave of recent union-curbing legislation that has torn through states such as Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana and, this week, Michigan. [More...]

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Energy & battery industry in Chicago - Will the city’s new energy industry thrive? Dec 8th 2012 | CHICAGO | from the print edition THESE days any self-respecting city desires a cluster—something that has nothing to do with breakfast cereal, but lots to do with whizzy ideas and bits of silicon. These concentrations of like-minded firms can attract a lot of investment, but are hard to create from scratch. In late November Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, announced that he has assembled the ingredients for a cluster of companies specialising in electric vehicles and batteries. [More..]

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Sugru hack of the century?

My iphone gets pretty heavy use as a journalist and had developed a small single crack--just from being dropped so regularly. Then last week the baby turned a minor problem into a total disaster. Without any warning he hurled the entire phone onto the concrete floor of Whole Foods Market. 
Duct tape (gaffa tape) worked well to hold it together for a few days, but then I hit upon the solution!

If you have never heard of the 'hack things better' compound Sugru then you need to know about this absolutely awesome stuff. (Particularly if you have children who break things like headphones and dinosaurs. All of which can be fixed with a blob of sugru.) The purple sugru was mixed with three mini packs (blue, red, white). It happened to be what I had in the house, rather than a desire for this shade of lilac. The textured surface was created with a paper towel and a leather iphone case.

"Clusterfuck" 2012

During the campaign this year I must be honest and say it was often impossible to know where downright denial ends and total BS begins. Clearly if one is to win, it is necessary to be optimistic and talk up one's chances. But there are limits.

A case in point. Despite the Romney campaign boasting about its epic get out the vote (GOTV) efforts, it seems the entire thing was a total disaster (and predictably so). Watch this fascinating clip, just prior to the election on PBS Newshour. The Romney campaign boasts about its historic GOTV technology. Then laugh like a drain. Romney's Orca project fell over spectacularly.....

It was an "unmitigated disaster" says one supporter, The Ace of Spaces. More fascinating still are the 600 comments to his post which explain how 30,000 of the most active Romney volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated on election day.

One writes "the bitter irony of this entire endevour was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favour of a centralised, faceless organisation in a far off place (in this case their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that". 
 
Another writes, "I'd say this was a world class clusterfuck. That's a technical term, btw."
 
 And another, "In the most GOP precinct in my city. Voted at 6AM. Got phone calls all day reminding me to vote. Got the last call at 6:59PM. The polls closed at 7PM. Clusterfuck."



Presumably all the bragging about superior technology was designed to keep the donors happy. If so, this is not the only area in which Republicans have been fleeced according to a clip from Morning Joe, where the conservative columnist David Frum explains how Republicans have been fleeced and exploited and lied to by a conservative entertainment complex.

That is a pretty big idea by itself. In other words that by insulating itself from the mainstream media and within an ecosystem that is little more than a conservative echo-chamber, that the right was unable to see what was really coming or have any real context. (We saw some of this in attacks on the statistician Nate Silver.)

It is one thing to ask whether, after all the money that has been spent, it was wasted given that a campaign has lost. There will always be a sense of money wasted on the losing side. But it is quite another to have a creeping concern that the right-wing media, political consultants, and contractors have had one priority alone: to milk Obama terror for all it is worth. 

Machine politics

Both political campaigns this year have been heavily involved in data analysis. I wrote about this in January in an article for The Economist. Just prior to the election we published a follow up piece. It rather hedged the question of which side had the R&D advantage, although hesitantly suggested that Mr Obama did. Subsequent to the election, I think it has become fairly clear (through leaks to the press) that Mr Romney was never able to even come close to the level of technical sophistication that Mr Obama could muster and given the timescale available to them were forced to buy solutions in from contractors.

Of course the big question now is what happens next to the organisation Obama for America, and the systems, that were built to do one thing: re-elect President Obama. But in the last few minutes, Jeremy Bird, the national field director, has told Obama's army that they are not retiring but resting up for the next battle. "You helped this country stay the course. Enjoy this victory for now and rest up. There will be more work to come. Stay tuned."

Mr Obama has created what must be the largest political organisation in history. It was able to make 125m personal contacts with voters (phone calls and door knocks) in a few days prior to the election. And this army will be re-tasked. But with the next presidential election not for another four years, what task could this army possibly address?

The next elections in the US are actually on November 4th, 2014. During the mid-term elections all 435 seats in the US House of Representatives will be fought over (as well as a number of Senate seats and governorships). Is it too much to speculate that Mr Bird has just fired the starting gun for 2014?


The cyber war 

Deus ex machina 

Voters are being targeted in new and powerful ways 

Nov 3rd 2012 | CHICAGO | from the print edition

 THE scene could be in Tampa, or Santa Barbara, or Chicago. Mr and Mrs Sixpack are relaxing after dinner with their iPads. Each is looking at the same news website, but each will be shown different political advertising. He sees something about naval bases, from the Romney camp; she sees a post about the president’s environmental record. This is a new trick. Behind this year’s digital campaigns—whether through e-mail, social networks, apps or web advertising—lies an enormous body of data that have been integrated for the first time. [More...]

Election night 2012

Live blogging at The Economist on election night 2012 starts soon.

Beyond the mountains...

Watch this beautiful trailer for a film being made by James Urquhart.