Edward Tufte Appointed To Help Track and Explain Stimulus Funds 186
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."
tufte has it easy (Score:4, Interesting)
just take one of the most famous graphs from his book, and reproduce it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/Napoleon's_Invasion_of_Russia [wikipedia.org]
relabel the advancing french soldiers "good intentions for accountable government"
relabel the retreating french soldiers "obfuscation by entrenched special interests"
job done
Mercy me... (Score:5, Interesting)
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" [edwardtufte.com]
I'm reminded of Feynman on the Columbia commission.
Re:Academics (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
Tufte scandal (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [skidmore.edu]
Stimulus is a dead issue. (Score:3, Interesting)
The stimulus is a dead issue. GOP won the round. Considering Bush essentially ran .5 stimuluses a year in deficits for 6 years and then capped it off with a stimuluses worth of bailouts for banks, its rather remarkable that the GOP could do so, but they did.
Trying to keep refighting the stimulus battle is just bad politics...
Obama ought to be a good enough fighter to know that and move on. His best hope for 2010 is to get the troops out of Iraq and declare an epic victory, then use the mantle of victory to take his case before the people.
Re:Academics (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The whole world loves us now! (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds like what I was saying in early 2007, but no one wanted to listen. Now a foreign observer, much more impartial than our own media, is saying exactly the same thing. Gee, I thought Obama was going to usher in a new era of global peace and prosperity. What happened? I would venture to guess that it has something to do with the fact that he has never run even so much as a convenience store, and now his naivete and inexperience are catching up to his vacuous rhetoric.
In Obama's defense, none of the other options were any better. McCain bends to the will of his party far too easily (we already had one puppet president for 8 years with GWB, we certainly didn't need 4 more with McCain), Ron Paul (like many third party candidates) is convinced that only his way is the right way, and everyone else was too polarizing.
Unfortunately, the extremes of the parties are the ones in control...this makes electing someone truly worthy of being president nearly impossible. You can't get anywhere in politics unless you give up your values, and once you give up your values you become worthless as a leader.
Dumb question (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:The whole world loves us now! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
This isn't an ageism thing, but I honestly feel that anyone in the house or senate over the age of 45 should not be allowed to be reelected, at least not for the next few cycles. Part of the problem is that so many people running this country are stuck in the past without an eye for the future. This worked fine in the 80's and 90's, but nowadays that just doesn't cut it.
Term limits in general would be a great thing...
Re:Academics (Score:4, Interesting)
Just another feel good appointment of an academic to a position where they can't really do anything
Yeah, I just don't see what good it would be to have someone who's known for being able to deal with large amounts of complex information and present it in easy-to-understand ways... especially an academic. I mean, just look at what horrible failure it was to have that academic Richard Feynman on the committee studying the Challenger explosion. Those ivory tower types just have no grasp on how things really work.
So, clearly you don't like Obama or Tufte... who do YOU recommend be put on this committee? And if you don't think the committee should exist, what do you suggest for better tracking and visibility of the stimulus funds?
Re:Academics (Score:3, Interesting)
Because requiring some discipline on spending by not allowing the printing of arbitrary amounts of money would be such a bad thing...
And of course that isn't the only thing he has suggested and certainly wasn't proclaimed as an instant fix
Finally, the "arbitrary value" of the metal is completely irrelevant. It doesn't have to be worth anything - it just has to of limited supply. Clearly people don't care if there's nothing backing their currency so the value part is irrelevant. All that matters is the "can't print at will" part.
Re:Academics (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh you misunderstand me. I wish more (many more) academics were appointed to positions of power. I just don't think this is a position of power. You can say that you're for openness, transparency, etc. and get the political benefits without really changing anything by appointing these guys to commissions that have no real power.
Look at what Elizabeth Warren has been doing. She has been blowing the whistle constantly for the past couple years. She's been entirely ignored. What reason do i have to believe that Tufte won't be completely ignored too?
Re:Background anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Academics (Score:1, Interesting)
The value of Gold (Being a rare and very useful element) is not arbitrary.
Making the rest of your statement pointless.
The value of anything is at least partially arbitrary! After all the the value that "The Market" assigns is just the average of the aggregate of many different values assigned during individual transactions. Furthermore, the supply, rate of consumption, and even overall demand of any given good can change dramatically due to technological and sociological conditions. Even treasure ship finds can cause cause short-term fluctuations in precious metals values. I know this is a hypothetical, but what do you think would happen to the value of gold if someone starts remotely mining a previously unreachable, yet huge, gold veins on the ocean floor or an asteroid that has about as much gold as as all known deposits on Earth?
Re:Mercy on him. (Score:3, Interesting)
Have any of these claims actually been established and/or verified?
The money laundering thing occurred after a team of undercover reporters virtually coaxed it out of the volunteers (and had tried to do so several dozen times before one fell for the bait), while I've never seen any sort of verification of the other claims from a reputable (ie. non-pundit) source.
To be perfectly honest, it smells a lot like the swiftboat "scandal"
Re:Blech. (Score:3, Interesting)
No one needs to respond to a quote as stupid as that. Republicans are opposed to Democrats on almost every possible area. They're deadlocked in everything, if for no other reason than that the Republicans simply don't want to compromise with a man who is disappointingly centrist.
Obama is no radical liberal. He's so corporatist it's been shocking to his own voter base. The fact that he hired Timothy Geithner, Bush's old top financial adviser, to write the bill to reform banks, speaks of how centrist he is.
On the other hand saying that the two parties are the same is just stupid. Yes Democrats also get donations from corporations, but there are so many documented instances where a Democrat receives money from a large corporation from then turns around and votes supporting a legislation against that same corporation.
Re:The whole world loves us now! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
True, it's splintered into factions (Teabaggers vs business conservatives vs religious wackos) but in the current Congress it has been remarkably unified. It says "No!" to everything. Of course, it's easy to be the minority opposition. You don't have to have any ideas on how to solve problems and move the country forward. (As an example of what happens when Republicans are fully in power, look to Arizona. Here the Republicans remain unified and committed to "No!" Our state is on beyond fucked.)
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.
What Democratic party are you talking about? In what bizarro world is it unified? Asshats like Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln seem to want to be all "mavericky" like that idiot McCain and his boyfriend Joe Lieberman, so any notion of party unity is a pipe dream. As for "rotting at the core," this happens as the Blue Dogs triangulate and try to have it all ways instead of having any principles.
Re:Mod parent up (Score:3, Interesting)
for one thing the biggest argument for fiat currency was so the government could regulate the boom/bust business cycle. It has shown not only to worsen it by making the booms and busts bigger but has also been shown to be abused horribly.
Re:Background anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stiglitz says the Fed is corrupt (Score:3, Interesting)
Right now, they (unelected) are effectively controlling government (elected) when it should be the other way around.
The Board of Governors is appointed in precisely the way the Supreme Court is appointed.
The member banks are privately owned. I thought that private ownership was precisely what Paul would want. But as private institutions they're even less accountable than government ones.