Search Results for: Epic

The Front-Runner’s Fall

Posted on by

Joshua Green:

For all that has been written and said about Hillary Clinton’s epic collapse in the Democratic primaries, one issue still nags. Everybody knows what happened. But we still don’t have a clear picture of how it happened, or why.
The after-battle assessments in the major newspapers and newsweeklies generally agreed on the big picture: the campaign was not prepared for a lengthy fight; it had an insufficient delegate operation; it squandered vast sums of money; and the candidate herself evinced a paralyzing schizophrenia—one day a shots-’n’-beers brawler, the next a Hallmark Channel mom. Through it all, her staff feuded and bickered, while her husband distracted. But as a journalistic exercise, the “campaign obit” is inherently flawed, reflecting the viewpoints of those closest to the press rather than empirical truth.

More from James Fallows.

“Google’s Addiction to Cheap Electricity”

Posted on by

Ginger Strand:

“Don’t be evil”, the motto of Google, is tailored to the popular image of the company–and the information economy itself–as a clean, green twenty-first century antidote to the toxic excesses of the past century’s industries. The firm’s plan to develop a gigawatt of new renewable energy recently caused a blip in its stock price and was greeted by the press as a curious act of benevolence. But the move is part of a campaign to compensate for the company’s own excesses, which can be observed on the bansk of the Columbia River, where Google and its rivals are raising server farms to tap into some of the cheapest electricity in North America. The blueprints depicting Google’s data center at The Dalles, Oregon are proof that the Web is no ethereal store of ideas, shimmering over our heads like the aurora borealis. It is a new heavy industry, an energy glutton that is only growing hungrier.

I wonder how the economics and energy consumption details compare between growing web applications and legacy paper based products?

Days on the Family Farm

Posted on by

Carrie Meyer:

A story both intimate and epic that paints a vivid picture of Midwestern farm life.
From the beginning of the twentieth century to World War II, farm wife May Lyford Davis kept a daily chronicle that today offers a window into a way of life that has all but disappeared. May and her husband Elmo lived through two decades of prosperity, the Great Depression, and two World Wars in their Midwestern farming community. Like many women of her time, Davis kept diaries that captured the everyday events of the family farm; she also kept meticulous farming accounts. In doing so, she left an extraordinary record that reflects not only her own experiences but also the history of early twentieth-century American agriculture.

Obama Blows it on MySpace

Posted on by

John Robb:

Micah Sifry has a great example of how the Obama campaign staff crushed a volunteer that had generated a huge following on MySpace. When the site Joe Anthony had sweated over reached epic proportions, the Obama campaign decided they needed to take control. So rather than hire the guy (or even fly out to meet him to interview/qualify him for the job) or even pay him a nominal sum ($40 k or so, for years of labor, a bargain no matter how you cut it), they went to MySpace (a company they were paying oodles to to help them promote the campaign at levels much less than Anthony’s site) to seize control of the it.

Robb has a new book out “Brave New War“, worth checking out.
OTOH, he’s done the right thing on debate media, via Lessig.

24 Hour US Air Traffic Animation

Posted on by

IAG Blog:

This is a very interesting sight. It depicts flights across the U.S. in time-lapse over a couple of 24 hour periods.



It has already garnered nine awards:
#49 – Most Viewed (All Time) – Arts & Animation – All #39 – Most Viewed (All Time) – Arts & Animation – English #87 – Top Rated (All Time) – Arts & Animation – All #37 – Most Discussed (All Time) – Arts & Animation – All #27 – Most Discussed (All Time) – Arts & Animation – English #46 – Top Favorites (All Time) – Arts & Animation – All #39 – Top Favorites (All Time) – Arts & Animation – English #79 – Recently Featured – All #16 – Recently Featured – Arts & Animation – All

Extraordinary Service in an Era of Low Expectations

Posted on by

My cell phone rang, displaying an unknown number while driving home from a Thanksgiving trip via the airport. Shannon from Milwaukee’s fine airline – Midwest – called to say that one of her coworkers found homework in the seatback of the plane we just vacated. She thought it important and wanted to know if we had a FedEx number so she could send us the missing homework via an overnight package.

Let’s just ponder this customer service outlier, or “black swan [more]” for a moment. We live in an era of low expectations:

  • Politics: Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss:

    But Ms. Pelosi’s damage to herself was already done. The well-known shortcomings of Mr. Murtha were broadcast for all to see — from his quid-pro-quo addiction to moneyed lobbyists to the grainy government tape of his involvement in the Abscam scandal a generation ago. The resurrected tape — feasted upon by Pelosi enemies — shows how Mr. Murtha narrowly survived as an unindicted co-conspirator, admittedly tempted but finally rebuffing a bribe offer: “I’m not interested — at this point.

  • Black Friday retail tactics:

    In Lewis Center, Ohio, near Columbus, Cindy Milsap, 43, and her daughter, Ashley, 20, woke up before dawn to drive to the nearby Wal-Mart Supercenter, which advertised a 52-inch high-definition television for $474. “We don’t really need a new TV, Ms. Milsap said. “But at that price? C’mon.”

    But the bargain eluded them. The “limited quantity” in the ad, she said, was three TVs — all sold by the time the pair arrived.

    Those customers left in peace.

  • The oxymoron that is “airline service“:

    With overcrowded airplanes, little civility in dress or demeanor of passengers, few meals, fewer amenities, industrywide salary cuts of epic proportions, and (the worst sin of all) airlines canceling pension plans because they’ve robbed the fund of hundreds of millions, far too many of America’s airline employees are shell shocked, depressed, disillusioned and resentful. In effect, we’re now an industry full of employees going through post-traumatic stress and wondering why we ever thought it was fun.

    And that, in a nutshell, equates to bad and inattentive service with a “who cares” attitude. Morale, in other words, is the key, and it’s in precious short supply today.

  • 2006 Airline Quality Rating website.

I remain astonished that a Midwest employee cleaning the plane found said homework, took the time to give it to someone who could find the owner, lookup their contact information, make a call, obtain the shipping information, place the papers in a FedEx package and send it our way. Everyone involved must actually care about the customer. What a concept. I hope that these words, in some small way encourage others to fly Midwest. There is indeed, no better care in the air.

Tufte on “Beautiful Evidence”

Posted on by

Jeffrey Freymann-Weyr:

Edward Tufte has been described by The New York Times as “The Leonardo da Vinci of Data.” Since 1993, thousands have attended his day-long seminars on Information Design. That might sound like a dry subject, but with Tufte, information becomes art.

Tufte’s most recent book, Beautiful Evidence, is filled with hundreds of illustrations from the worlds of art and science. It contains historical maps and diagrams as well as contemporary charts and graphs. In one chapter alone, there’s an 18th-century depiction of how to do a cross-section drawing of how a bird’s wing works and photos from a 1940s instruction book for skiing.

audio

On the Pentagon

Posted on by

Milt Rosenberg:

Dwight Eisenhower once said, “The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.” Some argue that the Pentagon (the epicenter of America’s defense) has evolved from a protective to a pernicious influence on the country’s international relations. After tonight’s 6:05 p.m. Cubs game, we will examine the role of the Pentagon in American history and in current American foreign policy—both positive and negative—with two experts: JOHN ALLEN WILLIAMS, professor of political science at Loyola University Chicago and an expert on the American military and national security, and National Book Award-winning author JAMES CARROLL, who tackles this very subject in his new book House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power.

Vail at the Crossroads

Posted on by

Nancy and I skied Vail years ago. It is a great mountain, but the term “village” really doesn’t apply any longer. Jared Jacang Maher asks if they must tear down a local landmark to save it. There’s been no shortage of controversy, including the defeat of two council members:

Crossroads not only stands at one of the town’s most prominent intersections, it’s a convergence point for wealth, power and mountain-sized egos, for small-town politics with big-city politicking. The official arguments may focus on topics like height and zoning, but citizens on both sides of the debate see the struggle as more epic, as a fight between Vail’s old-time founders and its younger newcomers for what the town is and what it should become. Emotions are high, and the stakes are huge. Because despite its theme-park attributes, Vail is a real place, with real residents who live and work here, who are born and die here, and who love and hate each others’ guts — all within town limits.

Like the facades of many of Vail’s early buildings, Crossroads is faded and cracked after decades of exposure to sunlight and snow. Built in 1969 on the East Meadow Drive corridor, the 60,000-square-foot, horseshoe-shaped complex wraps around a parking lot with three stories of condos sitting above a ground floor of retail. The two biggest tenants — Clark’s Market and the Crossroads Cinema — both pulled out last month, citing slow business and deteriorating facilities.

Reminds me a bit of the local Whole Foods / Hilldale / Sentry Foods battle.

Google’s WiFi Privacy Ploy

Posted on by

John McMullen:

What this means is that Google and Earthlink plan to use online files (known as cookies) and other data-collection techniques to profile users and deliver precise, personalized advertising as they surf the Internet. (Earthlink is working with the interactive ad company DoubleClick, which collects and analyzes enormous amounts of information online to engage in individual interactive ad targeting.)

Not everyone is enthused by the Google/Earthlink model. San Francisco was advised by a trio of privacy advocates to develop policies that would respect personal privacy. In letters to the city, the ACLU of Northern California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the adoption of a “gold standard” for data privacy (pasted in below from http://epic.org/privacy/internet/sfws22106.html), insuring that its Wi-Fi system would “accommodate the individual’s right to communicate anonymously and pseudonymously.” The groups also suggested that the city require any Wi-Fi company to allow users to “opt in” to any data-collection scheme. [Full disclosure: I rent office space in Washington, DC, from EPIC].