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Edward Tufte Appointed To Help Track and Explain Stimulus Funds
President Obama recently announced several appointments to the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, including data visualization expert Edward Tufte, author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. The purpose of the panel is to advise the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose aim is "To promote accountability by coordinating and conducting oversight of Recovery funds to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse and to foster transparency on Recovery spending by providing the public with accurate, user-friendly information." Tufte said on his website, "I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I'll learn something. The practical consequence is that I will probably go to Washington several days each month, in addition to whatever homework and phone meetings are necessary."
It's also inexcusable that billions upon billions of dollars were given out without anything in place to track where that money was ending up. It's only after the fact that they consider such accounting?
A mere $10,000 student loan has greater financial controls in place than the stimulus funding.
This should be - v e r y - interesting indeed.
I have enormous respect for Tufte and his integrity. I can;t wait to see what happens.
Remember, this is the guy who put Stalin on the cover of his pamphlet on "The Cognitive Style Of Powerpoint"
I'm reminded of Feynman on the Columbia commission.
-=Maggie Leber=-
he should fire Geithner and replace him with Elizabeth Warren. But no, he won't do that.
Warren? Well, anyone would be an improvement. Wouldn't Ron Paul be better? As treasury secretary, his peculiar opinions about abortion would be about as important as Tom Cruise's insights about foreign policy, i.e. quaintly irrelevant to the task at hand. Would be a nice last job for a smart old man (I mean RP not Cruise)
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It should be called the Recovery Advisory Panel Enhancement
My karma is not a Chameleon.
I own his books and recommend them but it seems Tufte is difficult to deal with in person. He charged credit cards for pre-orders before shipping his not-yet-published book and then called someone who politely objected to that a "whiny sanctimonious asshole."
See Flip Philips' blog entry about the scandal here
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
So, no Power Point presentation?
I took a grad school seminar with him at Yale. The man is loopy, but he has a truly powerful brain. He comes up with ways of looking at problems that are like time bombs. First you think he's a crackpot - how could anyone propose something so ridiculous? Then a few days later, it's been stewing in the back of your head, and your mindly slowly blows as you realise just how much cleverer it is than anything you've heard before. Simply putting him near anything involving information is almost guaranteed to make it better somehow.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Shouldn't this post have been created first, *before* the gov't let loose billions of our taxpayer dollars, seems once in the wild, tracking that cash is going to be difficult.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Right, because the best choice would be someone who seriously believes that replacing our arbitrarily valued currency with vaults full of arbitrarily valued metal will fix everything wrong with our economy.
Bottles.
Not surprised.
The Republican party lost it's spine a long time ago and have splintered into many factions. Effectively, the party was dead even before the 2000 elections and since then has been without leadership.
The Democratic party however, has been very unified but has been rotting from the core since the days of JFK. Now, it too is crumbling apart with rampant thuggery and corruption.
I think we all know how the November elections will turn out. However, there is no way in hell we can foresee who the next president will be. Our political system as we know it, is fucked. I reckon this is a good thing. Perhaps now we can get people more involved with how politics happen in DC and start voting based on someones voting record, and not based purely on party. At least, I hope so.
Life is not for the lazy.
I don't think he ever once said it would fix everything. It would seriously help though to have it based on something that the supply isn't as easily gained as hitting a print button.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Quite simply, he will be helpful because when he puts together a report, there will be one or two incredibly informative graphs that explain where the money went and how that money changed things.
By having this information in such a concise, digestible form, it will help bring transparency and accountability to the government.
One of the major issues we're having in the U.S. is that one side is saying one thing and claiming absolutely that they are right while the other side is making contradictory claims just a vocally. Getting some real, solid, hard numbers and easily understand representations of these numbers will make these kinds of useless back and forth arguments less possible.
At least that's the theory. We'll see if he can make any difference in practice.
I think someone in favor of more regulation and not less would be best for the job.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians. Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality.
"They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens.
"This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.
"If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.'" —George Carlin
link
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
he has never run even so much as a convenience store
I realize this is really only intended as empty rhetoric but, come on. Here are a few things Obama has run, for everyone's information:
The Harvard law Review
Chicago's Developing Communities Project (DCP)
Illinois's Project Vote
Chicago Annenberg Challenge
Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services
U.S. Senate's subcommittee on European Affairs
Now, I realize that it is at least arguable that none of these provide the leadership experience required to be an effective president. You probably would like to have seen a former governor/mayor/head of a large agency. I don't think that sort of experience is strictly necessary, but I see how reasonable people could disagree. (Though, if I may ask, what leadership experience does John McCain have that qualifies him in your eyes? Is it just length of service in the Senate?)
But to say that Obama has not run so much as a convenience store is just totally false and it smacks of an either mean spirited (or, at best, willfully ignorant) parroting of the popular right-wing line that Obama is somehow a lightweight.
caritj.org
Unless by "extremes of the parties" you mean the rightmost extremes of both parties, I think you've gone round the bend. If the extreme left wing of the Democrats had been in control, Dennis Kucinich would have been the nominee. That guy really is far to the left. Obama? There are few Democrats more centrist. Just a quick example: health care. The current plan in play in Congress is almost exactly the same as the one Mitt freakin' Romney signed into law when he was governor of Massachusetts. Until recently, this would have been a Republican health care plan - the mainstream opinion among Democrats is that single-payer is the way to go.
Regardless of your personal preferences on issues like health care, it's an absolute fact that the Democratic party is controlled by highly centrist types, and the Republican party is being run by, not to put too fine a point on it, whackjobs.
1. he is not stupid - he is a strict constitutionalist.
Oreaaaaly? What's the Constitutional basis for Paul's Sanctity of Life Act, which defines human life as beginning at conception?
Founding fathers knew the opression from the almighty government first hand and were reluctant to give federal government more power than necessary.
Right, which is why all the "strict constitutionalists" also rant and rave about the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the USAF, spy satellites and NORAD. Because the Constitution only allows Congress to fund an Army and a Navy. Oh wait, they don't - which means the entire lot are political hacks.
They chose gold and silver to be a legal tender so nobody has a print button - fiat currencies were tried in their times already and failed.
Nevermind that we actually had more financial collapses under a backed currency than under a fiat currency. It's like gold bugs have excised the 19th century from their minds.
When people start to gamble and overinvest (prosperity) they compete for loanable funds. These funds shrink rapidly and IR raises to match high demand.
Nevermind that the current crisis was banks making insanely risky investments at 60:1 asset ratios. What would the gold standard done to prevent this? Nothing whatsoever. And of course we were on the gold standard when the economy crashed in 1929, for much the same reasons as it did in 2008.
There was a recession of 1920 (caused by retooling to peace time production and returning soldiers sharply increasing workforce numbers), more severe than the Great Depression - it ended in 1,5 years because government did nothing to fight it. Great depression was enlarged and stretched out by failed policies meant to end it.
Wow. You should have stopped digging a hole in your credibility when you passed Baghdad Bob. When there's a total economic collapse, the only entity that can stimulate demand is the government. Know when FDR actually made the depression worse? When he listened to fiscal conservatives and slashed spending in 1937 to cut the deficit.